ICU
by SkidInSideways
Summary: It's been a long summer, and it's not over yet. This is one fan's overheated response to the burning question, And then what happened?
1. Ballistics

House does not belong to me, by which I mean House the TV show, House the character, and even the House I live in, which still belongs to the bank...and I make no representation otherwise in any way, shape, or form.

Ballistics

Three factors determine the extent of injury from a gunshot wound. One is velocity, or the speed at which the bullet travels as it leaves the muzzle. Another is frontal area, meaning the surface area of the bullet that strikes the target. The third is the distance the bullet travels before it is stopped—for example, by lodging in the neck and abdominal cavity of a middle-aged doctor.

The 9 mm Glock 19 is a medium-velocity weapon with a relatively short barrel. Its cartridges are small, carry little gunpowder, and travel less than 1500 feet per second. Nevertheless, they can create a hole three to six times the size of the bullet's frontal surface area, because the frontal area flattens and spreads as it hits the target. The nose of the cartridge deaccelerates rapidly at this point, but its center of gravity is located near the base, so momentum carries the bullet forward, tumbling end-over-end and leaving further tissue damage in its wake.

Distance is a factor because air resistance slows the bullet. Increasing the distance between gun and target decreases the bullet's velocity, reducing its kinetic energy. Unfortunately, most victims are shot from close range—such as half the width of a standard conference room.

The kinematics of the experience are likely to go unappreciated by the victim, whose immediate response tends to be purely visceral. Author George Orwell, wounded by a sniper in the Spanish Civil War, described "the sensation of being at the centre of an explosion. There seemed to be a loud bang and a blinding flash of light all round me, and I felt a tremendous shock … I knew immediately that I was hit …. I had a numb, dazed feeling, a consciousness of being very badly hurt, but no pain in the ordinary sense."

The hip-hop artist Gravy, who was recently shot outside a New York City radio station, described a somewhat different experience. "The only thing I remember is falling, and knowing I'm shot—just don't know where. It's not like, when you get shot, 'Oh, I got shot _here_.' Nah. You know you hit, so your mind frame is—you pumped, your adrenaline is going."

-0-

About adrenaline: Generations of Hollywood gunfight scenarios have taught us that shooting victims invariably fly backward and are dead before they hit the floor. It's probably what the assailant expected when he planned his attack. The doctor was working from a different script. Small-gauge weapons can inflict lethal wounds, but they don't necessarily take the victim out of the game immediately. Instead, a burst of adrenaline might propel him forward rather than back. The world of gun enthusiasts abounds with legends of animals and humans who withstood a full round of ammunition and managed to beat the bejesus out of the assailant before perishing from blood loss. Military personnel and law enforcement agents who carry 9mm pistols in the line of duty speak of the Glock with less reverence than collectors because they lack the stopping power of a larger-calibre weapon, and when you need to take down an opponent—say, he's coked to the gills on crystal meth and coming straight at you with a knife, or you need to make a hasty getaway from a busy urban hospital—stopping power is essential.

Seeing their boss get shot was easily the most horrifying spectacle any of diagnostics department staff had ever witnessed. Watching him rise to his feet and face his attacker came a close second. Greg House winced as he tried to straighten; touched his side and came away with blood on his fingers; touched his neck and picked up more fresh blood. He regarded the gunman with contempt.

"God, you're a lousy shot," he mocked, spraying more blood with every word. "Can't even take out a one-legged doctor at close range. Who are you, anyway? You were never a patient of mine."

Eric Foreman was the first shake off the paralysis that had immobilized the team. "House, lie down!" he barked. "You're wounded, you're hemorrhaging—get down!"

Adrenaline can be a very short-lived high. House turned toward Foreman's voice, suddenly bewildered. He opened his mouth to speak and choked up fresh gobbets of blood instead. His knees buckled. Foreman and the other male team member, Robert Chase, caught him under the arms and lowered him to the carpet. Allison Cameron, the remaining member, picked up the conference room phone in a shaking hand and punched "0." "Get me ER," she said hoarsely.

The gunman watched them with a blank expression, his anger apparently spent. Chase turned on him savagely.

"Get the fuck out of here," he snarled.

The gunman backed toward the doorway. Outside, the corridor was filling up with anxious, milling hospital personnel.

"Stop him! He has a gun!" cried Cameron, but the news only caused the crowd to part gingerly as the gunman made his way to the elevator bank.

House was meanwhile responding to the double insult and blood loss by transitioning to hemorrhagic shock. His pulse quickened and became thready, his breathing more rapid, his blood pressure dropped. The sense of outrage that had driven him to his feet dissipated and gave way to confusion. He was suddenly, acutely aware of the foreign objects lodging in his neck and side.

"The bullet, it's hot," said Gravy. "It makes you feel like you can't move, like something is holding you." He added, "You got to get shot to understand."

As Foreman and Chase began searching for entry and exit wounds, House had the peculiar sensation of standing behind them, evaluating their technique but unable to direct them. He heard Foreman tell Cameron to get some clean t-shirts from the stash House kept in his lower desk drawer, and he wanted to protest—the bloodstains would never come out—but the right words wouldn't come to him. Chase bent over him and began delicately probing his neck. The Aussie's face kept fading to white. House opened his mouth to speak, and a salty trickle ran out of the corner of his mouth and down his neck. Chase paused and fixed him with a look.

"It's under control," he said firmly. "You can relax now; we'll take it from here."

How professional he sounds, House thought distantly. Maybe they do know what they're doing.

And on that happy thought, he allowed the darkness to claim him.

-0-

All three fellows were conscious that they had entered the "golden hour," the period when following correct trauma management procedures means the difference between temporary incapacity and permanent injury or death. Foreman began directing the ER personnel who responded to the scene. Chase applied compression to the abdominal wound with grim dedication. Cameron tended to the neck wound and chanted words of encouragement to the unresponsive patient.

A gurney whisked House away to the ER, although "whisking" was easier said than done. The hospital was in an uproar now; the corridors were now jammed with staff and visitors, anxiously trading rumors and opinions. Cuddy appeared and strode alongside the gurney firing questions no one could answer yet. Wilson brought up the rear, looking stunned and saying nothing.

The procession inspired commentary from the sidelines. "This is only the first time that asshole has been shot?" smirked a cardiologist with a history of bad blood between him and House.

Cameron brought the parade to a halt as she turned to face him.

"A man has been shot," she reminded him, her voice shaking with rage. "At least have the decency to keep that kind of crap to yourself until he's in the OR." The gurney moved on.

"Who was that?" asked the cardiologist's companion.

"House's groupie," came the answer. Chase made as if to go back and confront him, but Foreman pressed him forward.

At last they glided through the automatic doors of the ER. House roused himself briefly. "Hello," he said. Heartened, Cameron reprised her central message: "You're going to be okay."

"You don't know that," House mumbled. The team exchanged a look: this was reassuringly pessimistic. Then, mysteriously, he added, "Tell Cuddy I want ketamine," and passed out again.

The ER staff moved forward to take over, their expressions grim as they assessed the damage.

The bullet gets all the credit in a gunshot wound, but it doesn't work alone, especially when delivered at close range. Hot gases from exploding gun powder and metal fragments from the bullet and the gun barrel are blasted into the body at the same time. The gases char the tissues, and the gun powder and metal fragments are deposited along the wound track. The edges of the entrance wound are abraded and haloed with a dirt ring caused by the bullet "cleaning" itself on the skin as it passed through. The wound also may be infiltrated with fibres from clothing that were dragged into the body along with the bullet.

An abdominal wound is complicated by the fact that the internal organs are packed under pressure and will try to escape if there is a weakness in the walls that bound them. When Chase removed the compression bandage from House's stomach and a nurse began cutting away his bloody t-shirt, a paraumbilical omentum—a fold of the peritoneum, the membrane that lines the abdominal cavity—protruded from the wound. Cameron blanched.

"Get her out of here," Foreman told Chase, jerking his chin toward the door.

"I'm fine," Cameron protested, but a moment later another inch of peritoneum worked its way out of the hole and her knees started to buckle. Chase put an arm around her and led her from the room.

House faded back in and tried to speak. Blood appeared in the corners of his mouth.

"Shut up," Foreman advised him. "I'll let you run this show as much as possible, but don't try to talk. Is it starting to hurt?"

House closed his eyes and nodded.

"The anesthesiologist is gonna want to know what medications you're on. Have you taken any Vicodin today?"

A heavy-lidded look from the patient.

"How much? Five milligrams? Fifteen? Thirty?" A nod. "House, it's not even 2 o'clock yet! All right, all right, never mind. Are you taking any other meds?"

A slight pause, then a faint headshake. Foreman noted the hesitation and moved on.

"Let's get the scary stuff over with. Can you feel your arms and legs? Any numbness or tingling in the extremities? Move your right arm; now the left. Lemme see you move your left foot; now the right. Grab my fingers—ow! Damn, man, you don't have to pull them off!" He whipped off a sneaker and poked at House's foot with a pin, using a hair more force than necessary. "Did you feel that?" Foreman looked up at his boss' face: House's eyes were closed, but he had lifted his right hand and extended the middle finger.

"I think you're gonna live," Foreman said drily, and for the first time since the gun appeared, House smiled.

-0-

In the waiting area Chase did his best to comfort Cameron, who was furious with herself for her unprofessional weaknesses. These included vomiting into a wastebasket as soon as they left the ER. Her co-worker's efforts at making her feel better just made her angrier.

"I'm a doctor, for god's sake," she seethed, "and I acted like a goddamned Homecoming Queen."

"You're upset—anyone would be," Chase soothed. "Seeing someone you know get shot is a traumatic experience. Seeing his guts crawl out of the hole is even worse."

"You didn't hurl," she said accusingly.

"No," Chase acknowledged, "but tonight I'm going to get very drunk, and I may have a nice technicolor yawn before morning."

Foreman appeared and dropped heavily into a chair, rubbing his head with both hands.

"They're taking him to Imaging for pictures," he said wearily, "then straight into surgery for celiotomy. We'll know more once they open him up, but he had a fit when I told them they could cut up those crappy Levis, and he flipped me off when I did the pinprick test, so he's not at death's door yet."

"What about the neck wound?"

"Everything seems to be working. Obviously he can move his fingers, and he definitely has feeling in his feet. They got the bleeding under control, too, so the bullet must've just nicked the external jugular and passed right through."

"It'd be a miracle if it did," said Chase. "The guy was standing right over him."

"With the two of you standing right over him," Cameron reminded him. "He was shaking pretty badly."

"Did you ask him if he knew the shooter?"

"Yeah. He's sure he's never seen him before."

There was a moment of silence. Wilson entered the waiting room and dropped heavily onto the sofa.

"What do we do now?" wondered Chase.

"One of us should probably check on Tongue Guy, make sure someone is following up with him," said Foreman. "Cameron, could you take care of that? Chase, you start looking into this ketamine thing—what does House want with animal tranquillizer? I assume he's not just looking to party."

"What are you going to do?" Cameron asked.

"I'm gonna swing by his place, see if—" Foreman swallowed the rest. Cuddy was walking toward them, followed by a pair of gentlemen whose suits and ties did nothing to disguise the fact that they were cops.

"I'm sorry to interrupt, doctors," she said, "but these men are detectives from the city police department, and they need to talk to you."


	2. Search Me

SEARCH ME

According to the report filed by investigators from the Princeton Borough Police Department, the perpetrator entered the conference room of the diagnostics department at approximately 1:41 p.m. By the time the investigators were through with the three staff members of that department, it was approximately 7:03 p.m. The victim had long since come out of the operating room and was in the intensive care unit, listed in critical but stable condition. Much the same could be said of his staff.

They had been interviewed at length, first as a group in the conference room—where they tried not to stare at the livid stains on the walls and carpet as they described how they got there—then individually at police headquarters.

They also got a fresh look at the perpetrator, who had been apprehended by hospital security as he tried to board a bus. All three easily picked him out of the police line-up; all three were surprised at how small and unthreatening he looked without the gun and the element of surprise. His name was Alfred Hunnicut, he was 53 years old, unemployed, and a duly diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic with a history of going off his meds and ending up as a guest in the psychiatric unit at Princeton Plainsboro Teaching Hospital.

On his last visit, Alfred overheard some orderlies gossiping about a particularly colorful doctor named House, who had recently scandalized the hospital staff by telling a patient he was suicidal and might as well shoot himself and get it over with. This was a gross distortion of what House had actually said, but it fit with what the orderlies knew about him very well, and many other examples of patient mistreatment from the past were trotted out to strengthen the case against him. By the time Alfred was released from the hospital, he had created a dramatic fantasy in which he starred as one of Dr. House's injured, outraged patients. After letting the story brew in his increasingly chaotic head for a month—he'd thrown away his prescriptions as soon as he was off hospital grounds—Alfred concluded that he'd be doing the world a favor by taking Dr. House out of it. He acquired a gun from a casual collector who believed background checks were part of a Communist plot to undermine America's civilian defenses, and hopped on a bus to the hospital.

The fellows learned Alfred's backstory not from an investigator, but from a chatty desk sergeant whom Cameron befriended with cups of coffee from the break room and lots of sex appeal. She gazed at him, admiration shining from her lovely eyes, coaxing details out of him with excited murmurs and soft cries of amazement. Her co-workers were genuinely amazed: they had never seen her work anyone like that before.

"But how did Alfred know you?" wondered Chase.

Cameron shrugged. "The sergeant says Alfred is a well-known nutcake—his word, not mine—with a talent for picking random names out of a conversation and remembering them. He says one of the orderlies could have mentioned me in one of the stories, and since I'm the only woman on the team..."

Foreman snorted and rubbed the space between his eyes. "Wish I had your talent for getting along with cops," he told her. "For some reason, they can't think of anything to do with me but bust my balls."

Cameron started to say that Foreman could save wear and tear on his testicles by curbing his reflexive hostility to cops when the detectives returned and told them they were free to go. The grimmer one reminded them to stay in town. He looked meaningfully at Foreman, who in turn looked at Cameron—See what I mean?—before bidding the detective a pleasant good night. Buzzing with coffee, jacked on sugar from the Snickers bars they ate in lieu of dinner, the three headed straight back to the hospital and the ICU.

Cuddy was with House when they arrived. She seemed to be doing a lot of intense talking, while House glowered at her from his pillow. Oddly enough, he didn't seem to be speaking. He saw the team and glared at them, too. Cuddy hurried out to the corridor.

"He's fine," she said immediately. "We've listed him as critical, but he's in pretty good shape, considering. However—" she took a deep breath—"there were some complications."

Cuddy ran down the particulars quickly. The abdominal injury, while initialy the more visually dramatic of the wounds, was actually the less worrisome. The bullet had gone clean through House's liver, lodging in a rib. It was removed, the cavity lavaged, and the stray bits of peritoneum tucked back in. Further surgery would probably be necessary, but for now the situation was as good as could be expected.

The neck wound was more problematic. As Foreman guessed, it wasn't dangerous from the point of view of spinal or vascular injury, but in removing the bullet, the surgeon nicked House's vocal cords, temporarily paralyzing them. They would eventually heal, but it could be six months to a year before he could speak above a whisper, and right now he had no voice at all.

"House with no voice," Foreman marvelled.

"We should just put him to sleep," said Chase. "You know he wouldn't want to live this way."

"Who was the surgeon?" asked Cameron.

"Urquhart."

"Too bad," said Foreman. "House always said if he had a dog he really cared about and it needed surgery, Urquhart is the only surgeon here he'd consider taking it to. Now there's no one."

"Maybe Urquhart did it on purpose," Chase speculated.

"Chase!" Cameron scolded.

Chase shrugged. "This way it'll be six months before he can start telling him all the ways he thinks he fucked up."

Cameron glanced into the patient's room. House had fallen asleep again. Sedation and pain medication had relaxed the muscles of his face, robbing it of the expressions—sardonic, mischievous, thoughtful, engaged—that made it such a canvas for his flamboyant personality and lively intelligence, and such an object of fascination for her. Now he looked like any man in a hospital bed, injured and helpless, at the mercy of his biological functions and the whims of the hospital staff.

She hated to see him this way.

"How is he otherwise?" she asked.

"Is House still House?" Cuddy asked wrily. "He had a fit when Bernstein"—the anesthesiologist—"wouldn't discuss ketamine. She finally put him under just to shut him up. She thinks I didn't notice, but I did... Just now he was giving me holy hell about his vocal cords. He can get a lot of insults across even without a voice. And he's still on the ketamine thing. What's that about, anyway?"

"We don't know, either," said Cameron. "We were going to do a literature search, see if we can figure out what he wants it for."

"Shouldn't you go home and collapse?" Cuddy asked, eyeing her doubtfully. "You've all had a hell of a day."

"I couldn't possibly sleep. I've had about a gallon of cop coffee, and my eyelids feel like they've been sandblasted away. Besides," Cameron gave a short, unhappy laugh, "I've already had my collapse."

"I'm up for a night of data mining," Chase said quickly. He stood and stretched. "I had even more coffee than Cameron."

"Suit yourselves," said Cuddy. "I've got a long night ahead, too. First I have to hear my head of security explain how a lunatic with a gun managed to get into this hospital, shoot a doctor, and stroll to the bus stop before anyone responded. Then I get to fire his ass." She peeked into House's room—he was still asleep—and left, heels tapping a Morse code of doom for the soon-to-be-former head of security.

Cameron massaged her neck.

"You don't have to do anything more tonight, you know," Chase said gently. "He's orbiting Pluto, he'll sleep for hours. The databases will wait until morning. You can go home, get some rest."

She shook her head, looking at her hands, which were clasped loosely between her knees. The men exchanged a look over her head.

"I'll drive you home," Foreman offered.

"I don't want to go home." Cameron hugged herself and added, "I don't want to be alone. In the dark."

Foreman and Chase traded another glance, acknowledging what neither man would ever say out loud except under torture: Cameron wasn't the only one who didn't want to take fresh memories of the afternoon's violence home to a dark, empty apartment.

"Right," Chase said brightly. "Let's go work that Medline magic of yours."

-0-

Foreman was halfway across the lobby when Wilson caught up with him.

"Going home?" he asked politely.

"Yeah."

"No, you're not," Wilson corrected him. "You think I don't know that look? You're going to search his apartment."

Foreman glanced at him, thought about lying, decided to take the Fifth. The two men walked side by side through the front doors and headed toward the parking lot.

"Where're you going?" Foreman asked suspiciously.

"I'm coming with you."

"I—"

"I lived with the man," Wilson said firmly. "I know what you're up against. You could be there all week going through his shit. At least I know what not to bother with."

"You know where all the bodies are buried, huh?"

Wilson, startled, considered this for a moment. "I don't _think_ there are any," he said. "But that would explain certain smells."

-0-

It took them fifteen minutes to find the morphine. Wilson spotted the box of works by standing in the middle of the living room and looking around to see where the dust had been disturbed. He and Foreman sat on the couch, wearily contemplating the half-empty bottle.

"He kept saying the leg was getting worse," Wilson said. "There didn't seem to be any physiological reason for it, so I assumed..." His voice trailed away.

"He acted like it was worse," Foreman agreed, "but who knows? All that stomping around could've been House jonesing for his next fix. Anyway, he's getting all the opium he wants now, so we can't do an intervention anytime soon."

They were silent for a spell.

"This is what you were looking for, right?" Wilson asked.

"Yeah. But as long as we're here, let's toss the place a little more. Think he'll notice?"

Wilson gave a short laugh. "Only if we accidentally clean it in the process." He went into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator door, and peered inside. "Oh, my god," he groaned.

Foreman went into the bedroom and emerged a few minutes later with a German medical journal in his hand. "A little light reading at bedtime," he said, flapping the magazine at Wilson, who took it and flipped through the pages.

"Check out page 28," said Foreman. The text made no more sense to Wilson than anything else in the publication, but apparently House had found it significant; he'd decorated all the margins with cryptic notes and underlined several passages.

"Sprechen zee deutsch?" Wilson asked, in a very bad German accent.

"No, and I can't read German, either," said Foreman. "But I know someone who can."


	3. To Lie, To Sleep

TO LIE, TO SLEEP...

Forty-five minutes later the two doctors were standing on the front step of a modest house two townships away, and Wilson was again asking, "Nurse Brenda?"

"Nurse Brenda Johnson, nee Heubusch," answered Foreman. "Both her parents are from the Old Country, and they raised her to be bilingual."

Nurse Brenda answered the door wearing the expression she used so effectively to intimidate clinic patients into waiting quietly for their turn. When she heard what they wanted, however, she turned it down a few notches and invited them in. She recognized the journal article immediately.

"Dr. House brought this to me a couple months ago," she said. "He can read a little German, but he needed help with the technical words."

"What's the article about?" asked Foreman.

"Some trial in Germany where they use ketamine to induce comas. I don't remember the details, but the idea is that after you've been in a lot of pain for awhile, the brain sets up a feedback loop that makes you think you're in pain even when there's nothing physical causing it. If they put you in a coma for a week, it shuts down the brain, which unlearns the cycle. About half the patients in the study came away with less or no pain at all."

"What did Dr. House think of the article?"

"You know Dr. House. He said something about bullshit science, excuse the French, and took it away without thanking me." Nurse Brenda snorted. Then she blinked a little. "Is he gonna be okay?"

"The wounds are pretty serious," said Wilson, "but they're not life-threatening."

Nurse Brenda nodded.

"I gotta tell you, there've been times I coulda shot him myself," she confided, in a low voice. "But the idea that some guy can walk in off the street like that… I had to send two nurses home today, they were hysterical, thinking every patient who walked into the clinic was packing heat. Anyway." She shrugged in an offhand way. "He's a jerk. You know that. But—I'd miss him if he wasn't around. He can be real funny sometimes. Plus he's a good doctor, when all's said and done, and it's never boring when he's on clinic duty."

-0-

The hallway leading to the diagnostic department was festooned with yellow police barrier tape. The rooms themselves were dark and silent. Foreman was reaching for his cell phone to call his colleagues for their whereabouts when a burst of loud, rapidfire conversation drew their attention to the OB-GYN lounge at the opposite end of the corridor. Cameron and Chase, their eyes bright with the fever that arises when overstimulation collides with exhaustion, were sitting at a table, half a pot of OB-GYN coffee between them, agreeing at top volume that House's request for ketamine was related to the German coma trials. They saw the two men enter, but when Foreman dropped the journal on the table next to their elbows, they jumped as if it was a lit firecracker.

"Look into the mind of a maniac," Foreman intoned. "Page 28."

Cameron seized the journal in jittery hands, almost dropping it, and began turning the pages, almost ripping them. Chase hitched around to look over her shoulder, almost falling out of his chair in doing so.

"Ease up on the caffeine," Wilson admonished them, setting a large object with a towel over it on a nearby table and pouring himself some coffee. "It's not really a good substitute for thinking, you know."

Cameron looked up at him, bewildered. "This is in German."

"It's about the ketamine coma trials."

"Isn't that House's handwriting? Where did you get this?"

"What's in the box?" asked Chase.

Wilson set down his mug and picked up the ends of the towel in his fingertips. "Ladies and gentlemen, Steve McQueen," he said, and whisked away the towel, revealing a plump Norway rat in a well-appointed cage.

"You searched his apartment," deduced Chase.

"Bright boy," Wilson told Foreman.

"We found the journal by his bed," Foreman explained. "We found the rat on his kitchen table."

"Did you find anything else?" asked Cameron.

Foreman looked at Wilson, who sighed and produced a small bundle from his coat pocket.

"We found this," he said.

Cameron unwrapped the bundle and set the contents—a syringe, a tourniquet, a vial of morphine—in the middle of the table. They all looked away, as if House himself had been exposed.

Chase finally broke the silence. "Are we surprised?" he asked.

"Yes," Cameron said fiercely.

"He's been in a lot of pain lately," Chase pointed out. "And he was really out of it last weekend, when I called him at home for a consult on the DeVries kid."

"So he was a little foggy! It doesn't mean he's shooting drugs!"

"No, but—"

"Did you see him shooting up?"

"But it fits—"

"I can't believe we're having this conversation! We don't even know this is for him! House never throws anything away, it could've been left over from—from something else!"

"Cameron, the man pops Vicodin like TicTacs!"

"He seemed to be cutting back—"

"He wasn't," Foreman said, with finality. "He said he'd had 30 megs before two o'clock this afternoon. You know he doesn't roll out of bed before nine. Thirty megs in five hours? And that's just what he admitted to."

"It's not left over from anything," Wilson added, toying with the vial. "Check the expiration date. He's only had it for a couple of months, and it's half empty."

Cameron opened her mouth to speak. Her eyes filled with tears. Chase covered her hand with his.

"We're not doing him any favors by going into denial with him," he said.

Cameron began to cry. "I just can't think of him doing that," she sobbed. "It's just so goddamned sad."

Wilson looked out the window, Foreman at his shoes; Chase rubbed Cameron's arm with one hand and reached for a box of tissues with the other.

"You know," Wilson said at length, "this actually throws a whole new light on the ketamine coma idea. Maybe it's not just about being pain-free."

"What do you mean?" asked Foreman. Cameron blew her nose and pulled herself together.

"This journal is almost a year old. The trials had been going on for a couple of years before that. You know House, he reads everything, especially if it's relevant to him. He had to have known about this long ago. But he only took it to Brenda for translating a few months ago. Why now?"

"You have a theory?" Cameron asked, nasally.

Wilson shrugged. "It's probably just wishful thinking," he said, "but maybe House realized how fast he was slipping, and thought of this as a way to kill two birds with one stone."

"He wasn't slipping," Cameron objected. "He came to work every day—"

"—and every day he was in more pain, in an uglier mood, doing crazier things," Wilson said firmly. "He was already getting worse before the Warner case, and once Stacy left, he really spun out."

"He's been under a lot of pressure!"

"He's been a bigger asshole every day," Chase said grimly. "Admit it."

Cameron closed her mouth and sat back.

"So you think House isn't just interested in ketamine therapy to deal with his leg; he's also thinking of it as a quick and dirty way to detox," Foreman said.

"And to stay off drugs," Wilson concluded. "No pain, no pain meds. Maybe he's decided to rejoin the world."

"Ketamine might be a good way to go at this point," Chase mused. "It's supposed to reverse morphine tolerance."

"Can he handle an induced coma right after what happened today?" asked Cameron.

"Doesn't matter," said Chase. "You can't do it in the U.S. anyway. The FDA hasn't approved it for this use, and only allows for two-day induced comas with any drug. The therapy takes five days to work. We'd have to send him to Germany."

"House in Germany." Wilson let himself think about that for a minute. "At least he can't talk," he added hopefully.

They sat for a moment, thinking.

"House isn't going to be too happy about waiting," Foreman said cautiously. "It'll be weeks before he can travel, and by that time he might change his mind. We'll lose the window of opportunity. Meanwhile, we've got the facilities—"

"Forget it," said Wilson.

"We've got an intensivist who knows his history—" Foreman glanced at Chase, who looked startled.

"There's no way in hell Cuddy will agree to this."

"So we lean on her a little."

"Lean on her? To do something that could jeopardize the hospital's accreditation? And incidentally lose us all our licenses?"

Chase found his voice. "It's not a simple procedure," he added. "Depressed respiratory function, amnesia, cardiovascular stimulation, hallucinations, lung and bladder infections...It could cause irreparable changes in brain function, the long-term effects aren't known..." He trailed off again.

Foreman looked stubborn. "We owe it to him to try." Wilson groaned. "Come on, man. The guy's willing to make a guinea pig of himself to break the pain and drugs cycle. Anything he wants to do, they tell him no, no, no, it's against regulations, it's too risky, your patient is too sick. It'd be nice if someone said yes to him for a change. Especially if there's a chance it might pull him out of this nosedive."

"It could also put us all at risk for nothing," Chase observed. "Half the patients get no relief at all."

"I still think we gotta let him at least try this. If we don't, what's the prognosis? We sew up the gunshot wounds, he recovers and heads straight back to the needle. Only now he's built up tolerance from post-surgery morphine. He's asking us to help him avoid that. How can we not try? You know he'd pull every dirty trick he could think of to help one of us."

Wilson thought of the hours House spent outside the morgue when Foreman was sick, waiting for the guard to take a p1ss break so he could steal inside and grab some brain tissue from the dead cop in hopes of sparing his junior the same ugly end. He wondered if Foreman knew about that.

Cameron looked straight ahead of her. "There's a chance he might not wake up any better off, or in worse shape," she said.

"Right," said Foreman.

"But there's also a chance he'll wake up with reduced pain or none at all, and maybe get off drugs for good." She looked around at the others. "You know what House would do."

"He might not wake up at all," Wilson reminded her gently.

"What kind of life does he have now?" Cameron asked, choking a little.

Wilson drew a deep breath.

"No harm in asking," he said.

-0-

"No," said Cuddy. Then, fearing she might have been too ambiguous, she added, "No, no, no. Nyet. Nein. Non. Drop it, forget it, don't ever bring it up again."

Wilson and the team stood watching her politely.

"It's insane! He's just had emergency surgery, we have no experience with this kind of thing, none of us is an anesthesiologist, it's not sanctioned by the FDA, it's—it's—it's illegal, for Christ's sake! The lawyers would tie me to a tree and burn me as a witch! You cannot ask me to do this. It's too dangerous for him. It's too risky for us. No."

Still no response from the team.

"There are 120 staff members working in the ICU in any given week," she reminded them. "There's no way we could hide what we were up to. Word would get out. There would be an investigation. The hospital would lose its accreditation. We would lose our licenses. All for a man who treats us all like crap and the hospital like it was his personal laBORatory!"

Cuddy dropped into her desk chair and regarded them with exasperation.

"It's after midnight," she pointed out. "I have to be back here in less than seven hours for a crisis meeting with the board of directors. I'm going home. You go too—all of you. Get out. Go get a good night's sleep, and come back here when you can talk to me sensibly about what we're going to do."

Silently, the team turned and left. Wilson lingered.

"Did you get through to his folks?"

"Yeah. I talked to his dad."

"Are they coming?"

"First plane tomorrow. I offered to put them up at a hotel at hospital expense, but he said they would stay at House's place." A thought struck her. "Oh, my god. House's place."

"It's taken care of," Wilson said tiredly. "I'll get a cleaning service in there first thing tomorrow. Foreman and I went through his stuff pretty carefully tonight, so there won't be any surprises."

"And—?"

"Pretty much what we thought. He's been dabbling in home remedies."

Cuddy dropped her face into her hands.

"I've been watching him ever since he came to me in February," she said, in a muffled voice, "but he didn't seem any different, and I hoped he'd put it behind him."

"From the looks of it, he hasn't been doing it long."

Cuddy raised her face and unashamedly wiped away tears. "I can't keep him on if he's shooting opioids," she said, not looking at Wilson.

He nodded and let her think about that for a moment. Then he said, "This procedure could give him a chance to start over. Not just pain-free. Drug-free, too."

Cuddy met his gaze and looked away again. Wilson moved toward the door. Hand on the doorknob, he paused.

"Should someone call—"

"I called her. Right after it happened. I didn't want her to hear it on the news."

"How did she take it?"

"How do you think? She was stunned. She cried. I can't imagine what kind of evening she and Mark had."

"Has there been a lot of media coverage?"

"Of course there has! They've been all over it. This could drag on for months—we'll be under all kinds of scrutiny. It's a bad time to try one of House's high-wire acts."

"Is there ever a good time? From an administrative point of view, I mean."

"From an administrative point of view, it's time to go home," Cuddy said firmly, turning off her desk light and rising. "Good night, Dr. Wilson."


	4. Instant Messages

When House broke the surface of consciousness early the next morning, he was gazing into the unshaven armpits of an ICU nurse in a sleeveless uniform as she hung a fresh bag of plasma on his IV tree. His memories of the day before were such a rummage sale of the real and the vividly imagined that he wasn't completely sure if he was awake or even alive. If he had died from the gunshot wounds, however, lush axillary growth was not a vision of heaven he was prepared to accept, and he willed himself back to oblivion.

A few hours later he opened his eyes again, this time to see Cuddy looming over his bed, arms crossed, a look of extreme vexation on her face. Another unpleasant vision. He opened his mouth to tell her so, then remembered the malfunction in his voice box. Lately it was just one nightmare after another, he thought.

"I am not happy about this," Cuddy began. Then she delivered an astonishing speech, the main thrust of which was that he was going to be allowed to try the ketamine coma. The speech was full of footnotes, conditions, and caveats, but the upshot was that the game was on. The only thing that could have made him happier would be running the experiment himself on someone else.

"Are you listening? House?" Cuddy waved a hand in his peripheral vision. "There will be no misunderstandings or surprises this time. Let's get everything on the table right up front."

The procedure itself was straightforward. He would be given ketamine in sufficient doses to keep him sedated for five days. To reduce the anxiety resulting from the confusion and hallucinations that often accompany the drug, it would be administered with another anesthetic, a benzodiazepine called Versed. He would be intubated, and his bodily other functions would be performed by catheters and IV tubes. His progress and vital signs would be monitored in four-hour shifts by his team, Wilson, and Cuddy. His parents, who were expected momentarily, would be allowed to visit as much as they liked, but no one else would be allowed into his room. The cover story was that he wanted to be spared undue media attention as a result of the shooting.

Cuddy made it clear that she still had reservations about this venture, not least of which was House's general level of fitness. Urquhart had been surprisingly upbeat after the surgery. "I half-expected to find the bullet had ricocheted right off his liver, with all the drinking and pilling this guy does," he confided, "but it was in pretty good shape considering it probably gets about 6,000 megs of acetaminophen a day. His heart and lungs are good, he's got the stomach of a 30-year-old: He's actually pretty healthy." Even so, Cuddy had an instinctive feeling that trauma followed by prolonged chemically-induced unconsciousness was not a prudent recovery protocol.

Her other reservation had to do with the ultimate efficacy of the procedure. Most of the world first became familiar with ketamine when it entered the club scene of the 1990s as a recreational substance with street names like Special K. It quickly developed a reputation as an accessory to date rape and overall your-brain-on-drugs bad news, acquiring an aura of danger that became both a selling point and a warning—this is serious stuff.

In fact, ketamine has been around for about 30 years as an anesthetic, amnesiac, and pain reliever, with an excellent safety record for both adult and pediatric patients. Not that it is completely benign: ketamine works by depressing the cerebral cortex, but it activates the limbic system, a complex of nerves and networks in the brain that controls basic emotions such as fear, pleasure, and anger, and patients emerging from a ketamine coma have been known to experience fits of irrational terror or rage and even strike out at those around them. Oddly, children are less likely to experience outsized emotions than adults.

Ketamine also appears to be particularly effective against the so-called "wind up" phenomena, in which pain is magnified and prolonged well beyond normal and is resistant to opioids and neuropathic agents. The role it plays in this process is not well understood, but the fact that it works at all at least half the time has raised the hopes of hundreds of thousands of chronic pain sufferers.

And therein lay Cuddy's deepest reservation. House was a man of soaring highs and crushing lows. She'd already had ample opportunity to watch him deal with disappointment after his expectations had been raised. In her experience, this usually led to a period of black depression and a noticeable uptick in self-destructive behavior. Now he was putting all his bets on an unproven, unapproved therapy. What if it didn't work? Or worse, what if it worked for awhile, then stopped?

If this were any other patient, Cuddy would have insisted on extensive psychological counseling before and after the procedure. She said as much to House, who answered with such a broad grimace of amusement and disbelief that a chorus of suppressed snickers rose behind her. She was going to have to cede this particular battle, but she knew that going in.

"Okay, one last thing," Cuddy said. "You need to appoint a new medical proxy. Now. No proxy, no coma. Do you want to think about it for a little while?"

House shook his head and scanned the group standing behind her. He pointed and mouthed:

"Chase."

-0-

The room emptied out quickly after that. Cuddy strode away to get a hospital lawyer and a laptop for House. Chase, looking gobsmacked, went to fetch his iBook. Foreman and Cameron drifted away to get coffee. Wilson was about to follow suit, but House caught his eye and gestured for him to stay.

"My parents," he mouthed.

"They'll be here right after lunch," Wilson assured him.

"Hotel?"

"What?"

House scowled and tried again, forming the words with exaggerated care. "Where are they staying?"

"Oh. Cuddy offered them a hotel room, but your dad says they'll stay at your place."

House winced.

"Don't worry about the mess. I got my cleaning service to go in and muck it out this morning. They'll firebomb the bathroom and kitchen, put clean sheets on the bed—it'll be fine."

House closed his eyes in something like despair. Wilson took pity and decided not to toy with him.

"Foreman and I went there last night," he said. "We found your works and brought them here. Unless you have any other secrets lying around your apartment, there shouldn't be any nasty surprises for Mom and Dad."

Eyes still closed, House nodded bleakly.

"You know, House, your problem isn't really pain, and it's not really drug addiction," Wilson said gently. "Your problem is the one four-letter word you refuse to use: 'Help'."

-0-

Cameron forebade herself to dwell on the possible reasons why House had chosen Chase instead of her as his proxy. Instead, she dwelled on why he passed over Foreman.

"I can see choosing Wilson, or Cuddy," she said. "They've known him the longest. But if he wanted to choose one of us, why not you? He loves you!"

"You mean, 'Why not me?'," Foreman said mildly, pressing the call button for the elevator.

"I don't mean that at all! I understand why he didn't choose me. Our relationship is weird enough as it is! But he never sees Chase without making fun of him. Why would he put his life in the hands of someone he doesn't respect, instead of someone like you, who he does respect?"

The elevator arrived, and they stepped inside.

"Maybe he thinks I'm still messed up from the biopsy," said Foreman, pressing the button for their floor. "Maybe he doesn't like me this week. Maybe it's another House mindfuck. Maybe he mentally flipped a coin and it came up Chase."

"Aren't you curious?" she persisted.

Foreman shrugged. "Yeah. I just don't see any point in chewing over it. Even if you could get an answer out of him, you could never be sure he was telling you the truth. Maybe he doesn't even know himself."

Cameron crossed her arms and grumbled quietly.

"Maybe we're overlooking the most obvious explanation," Foreman added.

"What's that?"

"Chase is the intensivist. We're really flying blind here: no qualified anesthesiologist, no respiratory therapist, no cardiologist, no experience with the procedure, almost no literature to guide us. Maybe he's worried the whole thing will go south." Foreman was silent a moment, then added, "And if it does, maybe he thinks Chase is the one who's most likely to pull the plug for him."

For the first time, Cameron grasped the enormity of what they were about to do.

"This really is insane, isn't it?" she whispered.

Foreman laughed. "Around here, 'insane' is the starting point," he said.

-0-

When they arrived at the Diagnostics Department a few minutes later, they found Chase standing outside the crime scene tape arguing with a cop. On the floor just inside the tape was a heap of laptops, printouts, and the cage with Steve McQueen inside—everything they had abandoned in the OB-GYN lounge the night before.

Having a plan of action had put heart in the team, pushing Alfred Hunnicut to the backs of their minds and making them suddenly capable of facing the shadowy corners of their dark, empty apartments. After a surprisingly good sleep, they met in the cafeteria the next morning to brainstorm strategies for reversing her decision. Instead, they had barely settled at a table when Wilson summoned them to Cuddy's office to hear about her change of heart. From there they went straight to House. In the meantime, the disgruntled obstetricians and gynecologists of Princeton Plainsborough Teaching Hospital hauled their belongings to their rightful department and left them there just before the police arrived to continue their investigation. The detectives were already annoyed because the items had been taken out of the room the night before. They were not inclined to permit further tampering.

Looking at the remnants of the mess they'd left in the lounge, Foreman only felt irritation—sure, they'd been inconsiderate, but under the circumstances, couldn't the other doctors show some leniency? Then his eye fell on Steve McQueen, huddled apprehensively in a far corner of his cage, and felt a sharp pang of guilt.

"It don't matter that it'll just take you a minute," the cop was saying to Chase. "I can't let you take anything out of here. Nothing. I'm sorry, Doc, but those are my orders."

Foreman looked hopefully at Cameron. Cameron took a step back, folded her arms, and looked at Foreman. He sighed and turned to the cop.

"I know it's important to leave the scene exactly the way it was," he said gently. "But Dr. Chase works in the intensive care unit for babies. Lotta sick babies in there, man. Some of them are dying."

The cop's face visibly softened. Foreman noticed and pressed his advantage.

"All his notes are in his laptop. We already messed up by moving our things around once. Would it really hurt the investigation to let Dr. Chase duck in for a second and get his computer? It could mean a lot to those babies."

The cop glanced around. The detectives were in House's office, huddled around his desk and not paying attention to the confab in the hall. "Get in and get out," the cop growled, lifting the tape so Chase could duck under.

"I'll just get this guy out of your way," Foreman added, deftly lifting the cage and a sack of rat food over the tape. "He wasn't here yesterday anyway." And before the cop could protest, the team had fled down the hall.

"That was good," Cameron remarked, "but next time remember to bat your eyelashes. We could've all gotten our laptops."

"You can really lay it on thick when you want to," said Chase. "The part about the babies was inspired."

"You have worked in NICU. There are a lot of sick babies in there. All your notes are in your laptop. Was there one word of untruth in anything I said?" The cage was starting to feel uncomfortably heavy. Foreman halted and switched hands. A thought struck him: "Where are we going, anyway?"

"I thought you knew," said Cameron. It occured to her that there was no place in the entire hospital complex where they could set up camp until the police finished searching their offices.

"Chase has a place to go," Foreman said accusingly. "He gets to hang out with the boss."

"Yeah," Chase said. "It's a dream assignment."

"You don't sound too happy about it," Cameron remarked.

"I'm not. It's just another chance to fuck up in front of House." The elevator arrived and he stepped inside.

"Chase," said Foreman softly. The Australian looked up at him hopefully. Foreman reached forward and gently pressed the handle of the rat's cage into his hand. "Take this with you."

Chase's shoulders drooped and he rolled his eyes upward. At that moment he looked like nothing so much as a medieval painting of an early Christian martyr—perhaps Saint Stephen, beautiful and uncomplaining in his agony.

But Foreman and Cameron were both raised as Protestants, and the resemblance escaped them completely. Instead, they headed to the Grab n Go for another coffee, agreeing along the way that Chase would always be House's whipping boy if he didn't grow a backbone and stand up to him once in awhile.

-0-

Greg House was a polyglot and a polymath, a board-certified doctor with two specialties and a Ph.D., a talented musician, and a quick study when it came to subjects that really interested him—a criterion that, alas, typing did not meet. Nor did he employ the two-finger, hunt and peck approach: he preferred to hammer on all the keys with all of his fingers at once, usually swearing ferociously at the results, and usually giving up almost as soon as he started.

He and Chase were now negotiating the details of the coma procedure and the preferred course of action for assorted contingencies via Instant Messenger—or, rather, House was furiously keyboarding and Chase was haltingly decoding the results. Given two people with reasonably good typing skills, IM was well-suited to the task, since it produces a text log of the conversation. As it was, Chase had hours of editing ahead of him.

watt is tth ep;an if i codfe? House asked.

"What is the plan if you code? We resuscitate, right? Unless...is this one of the No Heroic Measures things?" House was already typing a response. "I can't keep them all straight," Chase pleaded.

f yore havng that mccuch troubel folowng me, i'l aks mr, golsdmthj tobe myy porxy, wrote House. Mr. Goldsmith was an elderly gentleman who had been in a persistent vegetative state for almost three years. House had adopted Mr. Goldsmith as a kind of oracle, and his room as an unofficial TV lounge.

waht i ment was how aarre yu gong to kepe alid on tihs if yu hava to cal for bacjkup?

"We have a short list of doctors we think will help us out without reporting us," said Chase.

hersh isnt on tha tlist i hoep. hes a biggre tattletael than yyu.

Chase made a note to take Dr. Hersh off the list. "Next time I hire a hitman, I'm gonna spring for the silver bullets," he muttered.

wnot wwrrk, House typed back. It;ll; jst maek m e mad

Chase was trying to decipher this riposte when House sent another message:

Dont yu watn to knwo why i piked you?

"If I asked, would you tell me the truth?"

House grinned and fumbled a reply: i waantd somone woh was sstill afraaid of gomg to hell.

Chase snorted. "After two years with you, who's afraid of hell?"

House laughed soundlessly. Then he glanced out the window, and his shoulders sagged. Chase followed his gaze and saw that Cuddy was approaching, followed closely by an elderly couple who were peered anxiously into each room as they passed it.

yore in lcuk, House typed, his mouth grim. ist a house faimly reunio n.


	5. To Sleep, Perchance to Dream

John House was in his early seventies, but he moved like a man twenty years younger: long-strided, strong, impatient. He led the little group by a length as it entered House's room, but rather than approach his son directly, he took up a station by the door and let his wife go first.

Blythe House was bravely essaying that mother's trick of not frightening her child by pretending everything was fine, and she almost pulled it off. She went straight to the bed, tried to hug her son—realized there was no way to do so without hurting him—backed off a little and kissed his forehead—squeezed his hand—then stepped back to get a good look at him. Her smile cracked at the edges and she began to weep.

"Mom..." House mouthed silently, patting her hand.

"Oh, I know, Greg, I'm not being a very good soldier, am I? But I didn't expect—" She waved a helpless hand at the wound sites, thickly bandaged, each with its own irrigation line, and House's face, which was bruised and swollen from the gunshots and the subsequent surgery. She dabbed a tissue to her eyes. She drew a deep breath and straightened herself. "But enough of that. How do you feel, dear? Are you in any pain?"

House managed a half-smile and nodded toward the morphine drip. "Never felt a thing," he pantomimed. Mrs. House looked bewildered. House glanced at Chase and assaulted his keyboard for a moment.

tel her i,m finee no pane jst disconmfort frtm teh sititches.

"He says he's not in any real pain, he's just a little uncomfortable from the stitches," Chase translated.

"You got off easy, then," boomed Mr. House. "The one time I was shot, I felt like I'd been hit by a two-by-four. Of course," he shot a significant look at the morphine drip, "we didn't have all these fancy drug dispensers in Korea." His eye fell on Steve McQueen, whose cage was ensconced in a place of honor on a counter where House could keep an eye on him.

"Is that a rat?" he asked, with obvious distaste.

House regarded his father, expressionless. Then he mouthed, "Hi Dad."

Mr. House softened a little. "Hello, son. I'm glad to see you looking as good as you do." Then, as if powerless to stop himself, he added, "What in hell did you do to that guy to piss him off so much he shot you?"

After another glance at Chase, House responded: tel himm i was donig teh guys sisster nad allmy chekcs wer bounccing.

Chase cleared his throat. "The police say the gunman didn't even know your son. He's a mental patient who sometimes stays in the psychiatric ward here. He overheard some orderlies talking about some of the doctors, and he seized on House's name and made up a big story around him."

"Hmmpf," said House Senior, his eyes still on his son. "Well, with an attitude like his, you can't blame me for thinking—"

"John!"

Cuddy stepped forward briskly. "I know you'd like to spend some time with your son, but we need to change his dressings, and I don't think you want to hang around for that. Have you had lunch yet? I'd be happy to take you to the cafeteria."

"I could eat," said House pere.

Mrs. House lingered by her son. "I suppose I should let you have your privacy," she said sadly, fluffing his hair lightly. "We'll be right back, okay?" She kissed his forehead. House granted her a small smile, then closed his eyes again. He kept them closed until they had left the room. Then they flew open and fastened on Chase.

sedatoin&recover yprottocoll, he wrote. only yuo fforeman wsilson in teh rom when i go under andd wajke yup/ noone esle neot evven cududdy especoaly NOT my pearenst.

-0-

"Interesting dynamics in the House family circle," Chase observed to Cuddy later. She groaned.

"Tell me about it. I had them in my office for half an hour before you even saw them. Believe it or not, Dad was actually a lot calmer up in House's room. You should have seen him when he first got here."

John House had declined to sit in Cuddy's office, preferring to stand and stare down at her and his wife as they sat together on one of the sofas. His back ramrod straight, he rocked heel to toe as Cuddy described the events of the day before, explained the results of the emergency surgery, and offered a prognosis. He stood utterly still as she began, hesitantly, to outline the rationale and procedure for the ketamine coma.

"So he's risking his life for a slight chance that he will come out of this with less pain from his leg," Mr. House interjected.

"I wouldn't say slight," said Cuddy. "Fifty-fifty isn't bad odds."

"Any odds are better than going on as he is," Mrs. House said sadly.

"Who says he has to go on as he is?" demanded her husband. "Has he ever given physical therapy a chance? Built up some muscle around that scar? No, he'd rather scare the hell out of us with a risky, illegal procedure—a quick fix, if it works!"

"Oh, John—"

"Oh, Blythe! Half the reason he's where he is today is because you taught him that it's okay to run your mouth and break the rules. Now he wants the easy way out of the consequences. That's just like him."

Cuddy broke in, a slight vibration in her voice the only indication that she was about to lose her temper. "The kind of pain your son has been experiencing isn't easily dealt with through physical therapy and exercise," she said. "It's intractable, spreading, and getting worse—just the kind of problem the ketamine coma protocol was developed to address."

"Pardon me for being blunt, Dr. Cuddy, but aren't you the one whose swell idea left him a cripple in the first place?"

He's frightened, Cuddy told herself. He's overwrought. You've seen this a thousand times; when there's a patient in critical condition, there's always one family member who starts throwing blame and insults around. She said, evenly, "Medicine is far from an exact science. The procedure I performed on your son's leg was intended to address the underlying problem—the infarction—without amputation. It succeeded in that sense, but it left him with chronic pain. With any luck, ketamine therapy will reduce or possibly even stop that pain." She rose. "Now, I'm sure you are anxious to see your son..."

Chase shook his head as Cuddy finished her story. "I'm surprised," he said. "Cameron met them last time they were here, and she said they seemed very nice—not at all the sort who raise their son to be a sociopath."

"The nut never falls far from the tree," Cuddy sighed, and headed back to her office.

Chase's pager buzzed. He checked: Call Foreman.

"Princeton's finest has finished sifting our coffee service for clues," Foreman reported. "It's safe to come down now, but don't slip in the blood."

The carpet in the conference was still splotched with bloodstains. When Chase arrived, a member of the custodial staff was regarding them with professional pessimism.

"It's not one of your stain-resistant carpets," he observed, for some reason directing his remarks to Cameron, "so that's not gonna come out any time soon. I'll do the best I can, but you'll probably always have some spots here and there."

Cameron, who knew next to nothing about getting stains out of anything, murmured sympathetically. Encouraged, the custodian continued: "I told them when they picked out the carpet last time, 'You want to spring for the Scotch Guard or whatnot. It costs a little bit more, but this is a hospital, fercryinoutloud—you gotta expected bloodstains!"

Foreman agreed that this was woefully shortsighted, but suggested the custodian take the matter up with his supervisor. "We're behind on our work as it is."

The man left slowly, still mulling over the dried remains of House's vital fluids. "Sure is a lot of blood in people," he remarked, and departed at last.

Alone, the team ran down the plan for the next five days. In addition to the medical procedures, Chase had drawn up a program of visual, auditory, sensory, and olofactory stimuli that he insisted be available to House round the clock.

"Chase, he's going to be asleep!" protested Foreman, reviewing an equipment list that included a laptop with a 20" monitor, a big-screen television, a stereo system, and an aromatherapy vaporizer.

"Soft lights?" asked Cameron. "Sound proofing? What do you think is going to go on in there, an orgy?"

"Some ketamine coma patients sleep through the whole thing; they can't believe more than five minutes had passed when they woke up," Chase said patiently. "Others fade in and out of consciousness. When they fade in, it can be very frightening if it's all harsh lights, loud noises, and the feeling of a tube in their throats. And that's all on top of very vivid dreams. This will give him something pleasant to look at and hear if he wakes up. Why not set him up for success?"

Foreman shook his head. His pager went off. "Gotta go," he said, consulting it. "I shouldn't be long—when I get back we can start putting up the lightshow." He left.

Chase began sorting through images to be turned into a slideshow for the outsized computer monitor. Motorcycles, Angelina Jolie (pre-pregnancy), sports cars, monster trucks, sailboats...

"Sailboats?" asked Cameron.

"Sure. House loves sailing."

"How do you know?"

"We got to talking one day. I grew up right by the ocean, you couldn't not learn to sail there. We compared notes. His family moved every two or three years, but whenever they were based near a sizeable body of water, his dad would buy a used boat and spend every free moment fixing it up and sailing. He even showed me pictures."

"House has pictures?"

"Yeah." Chase led the way into House's office and went to a filing cabinet. The drawers were neatly labeled "Ongoing cases," "Closed cases," and so forth, but now that Cameron looked at them, she realized the labels weren't in House's handwriting. Chase opened a bottom drawer. Inside was a battered cardboard box marked "Office." He opened it and took out a picture in a frame. "He said this was his favorite boat, back when his dad was stationed on Lake Champlain."

The photo was a color shot of a tall teenager straddling the twin hulls of a catamaran. His head was tilted, and there was a cocky grin on his face. Cameron felt an odd electrical sensation in her fingertips as she held it. The boy was 30 years older now, but the confident pose and the sly expression were as familiar to her as the walls of this room.

"I never would have taken him for a sailor," she said. "I guess I don't know a lot about him outside of work."

"Really? You never sit around just shooting the bull with him? He's an amazing guy, when you get him away from an audience. He's done all kinds of wild stuff. He's got a pilot's license too, you know."

"I didn't know." With a pang, it occured to Cameron that she had never asked House anything about his life outside of work except his marital status. Maybe he'd show more interest in me if I showed more interest in him, she thought.

"Let's see what else he's got here," she said. "There's a scanner in the marketing department—we can put all kinds of photos on CD for this."

-0-

A decision had been made to start the procedure at night, when there were fewer staff on duty and almost no visitors. Just before dark, Cameron slipped into House's room alone. Chase had already set it up for his multimedia stimulation program. The only element not there was the aromatherapy vaporizer: "unles yuo can maek it semll liek a balllpakr frank nad a bere getit oot of heer," House wrote. "i dont watn my riom smeling lkie a head shiopp."

"Welcome to Studio 54," said House. He eyed her curiously.

"Chase says I'm not allowed in the room when they put you under," she said, "so I wanted to, I don't know, see you off. Say good luck."

House volunteered half a smile. "You're pathetic," he mouthed.

Cameron had come prepared for that very reaction. "I'm pathetic?" she demanded. "You're the one pissing into a bag." House raised his eyebrows, acknowledging her point.

Having delivered her line, Cameron forgot what she had planned to say next. Something about courage? "I think what you're doing is very brave. I want to help. If there's anything I can do to make this more—pleasant, or whatever, let me know. I'm not going to hang around, but if you think of something I can do, tell Chase, okay? I'd like to feel like I—contributed," she finished lamely.

House made her look at him.

"Cameron," he mouthed. "I lied to you."

She looked at him hopefully, her heart beating faster.

"I do like you."

"Oh." She took a step toward the bed. "Oh, I like you, too; in fact—"

House held up a silencing hand. "No deathbed confessions," he managed. "I said like. Just like."

"Of course!" She laughed, feeling a little silly and exquisitely relieved. "Of course. And I, I like you. Remember, anything you need. Tell Chase. Okay. Well. See you later!"

"You'll see me," House aspirated cryptically. "Will I see you?"

-0-

An hour later Chase, Foreman, and Wilson entered the room looking somber.

"You look like a firing squad," House observed.

"What?"

"Never mind."

"What?"

House made a dismissive gesture and settled back on the pillows.

"Let's do it," he mouthed.


	6. Wilson

Ketamin hydrochloride is a fast-acting anesthetic: an intravenous dose of 1 mg per pound of body weight, delivered over a period of 60 seconds, usually produces surgical anesthesia in half that time. House being who he was, it was almost 45 seconds before his eyes rolled back and the lids shut. But once that happened, he didn't stir again.

Chase set up the microdrip that would maintain House at that level of unconsciousness for the next five days. He and Foreman inserted the respiratory tube and arterial wires that would monitor his oxygen level, blood pressure, and heart rate. Then they stepped back and admired their work.

"Sleeping beauty," murmured Wilson. In truth, in spite of the longer-than-usual stubble, the bruises, and the wound dressings, House looked unusually peaceful.

"He almost looks happy," Chase said wonderingly.

"Maybe he's getting the good kind of dreams," Foreman said. "Maybe Carmen Electra is feeding him ice cream, or something."

"More like he just won the trifecta at OTB," said Wilson. "Listen, it's late. You two can go on home—I'll take the first watch."

"You've got me on your pager? You have my home and cell number?" asked Chase. "Don't worry about calling any time. I can be here in fifteen minutes if you need me."

"Got it; got it; will do. Go on home, Chase—you look like death on toast."

"Right, I'm on my way. Keep the music on—not too loud, just like that—and if the screensaver acts sluggish, go ahead and reboot. Let me show you how—"

"Chase. Go home."

Chase began to explain the Tivo settings that would permit continuous viewing of American Chopper when Foreman put a gentle but firm arm around his shoulder and walked him out the door.

Alone, Wilson pulled up two chair s—one to sit on, one to put his feet on—and settled in for a long night.

-0-

My brother Daniel almost hanged me when I was four years old.

He didn't mean to kill me. He was trying to teach me to fly. We'd just seen a local repertory production of Peter Pan, and our father explained to us how the backstage crew used ropes and pulleys to make the star fly across the stage and out over the audience. It wasn't a very detailed explanation, though, and he completely left out the part about the harness under Peter Pan's costume. So when Daniel, our middle brother Chip, and I assembled under the apple tree, all Daniel brought with him was a clothesline, which he tied to my waist.

They managed to flip one under of the rope over a high branch and hoisted me up. But instead of soaring around the backyard, I flopped in the middle like a rag doll. Daniel decided to remedy that by passing a loop of clotheline around my neck. He and Chip were just about to hoist me again when Mom happened to look out the kitchen window. She came running out of the house screaming, and as she untied me she gave a gruesome description of the consequences if she hadn't intervened.

It was an impressive speech, and neither of my brothers were tempted to try again. But if Daniel had suggested it, I would have agreed without hesitation. He was my idol. I would do anything—even die purple-faced of asphyxiation or a broken neck—for a moment of his attention.

Daniel was only four years older than me, but even at eight he was a man in my eyes. I assumed he would always be taller, stronger, smarter, and funnier than me. He would take more risks, hatch wilder schemes, stay up later, and talk back to grown-ups, a thing I would never dare to do. That was fine with me. It meant I never had to move out of the safety zone, because Daniel was already out there ahead of me. And by letting me tag along as his sidekick and audience, he allowed me to bask in the reflected glow of his outrageousness.

He wasn't a saint. Daniel had a cruel streak, and there were times when I suffered at his hands. He caught hell for it, of course, but Mom or Dad always took me aside afterwards and explained that Daniel wasn't mean because he didn't love me; he was just upset over a fight with a friend, or a bad grade on his report card, or because the family cat had died. It was my cat, too, and I hadn't deliberately tripped anyone on a concrete sidewalk, but I got the impression my way of dealing with sadness or anger, while preferable, was not the only way, and that bad behavior could always be explained and therefore forgiven.

But forgiveness has limits, and by the time he was 22, Daniel had been busted for using drugs, busted for selling drugs, expelled from high school for setting fire to a hated teacher's car (an accident, he said), in rehab, enrolled in college and flunked out, in another rehab, enrolled in another college and dropped out, and finally thrown out of our parents' home for stealing Dad's car (he only borrowed it, he said), getting drunk, and leading the cops on a high-speed chase that ended when the car jumped the sidewalk and crashed into a coffeeshop.

There would have been even more sins laid against him, but I had appointed myself his guardian early in his career. I was the one who mopped up the vomit when he stole a bottle of Passover wine and puked it up in the rec room. I covered for him when he turned up at dinner stoned out of his gourd, and sat there giggling at nothing. I lied for him when he skipped school and when he cheated on his girlfriends.

I was waiting for him to come to his senses. I was sure that someday he would realize how stupid and self-destructive he was being. At that moment, I would be there to help guide him along the path to good health and sanity, and restore him to his former glory as my big brother.

Instead, he cut me out of his life and sailed away, out of reach.

I was 18, packed and ready to leave for my first year at McGill. Daniel had been gone for months at that point, but I was determined not to leave without saying goodbye. It took hours, but I finally hunted him to ground in the bleakest section of the city, squatting in an alcoholic daze next to a pile of ragged tarps, cardboard, and filthy blankets. He raised bleary eyes to my face and grinned. He'd lost a tooth.

"Jimmy, dude, how ya been? You're looking good. Got a cig?"

I didn't smoke, never smoked, but I always carried a pack in case Daniel wanted one. I handed him a cigarette and a book of matches. He lit up, squinting me through the smoke.

"You got nothin' to say? That's okay. Check out the pearly whites, dude. Fuckin' cop kicked out my tooth for oversleeping. Fascist asshole."

This was probably bullshit, but it could just as easily be true. Daniel had a way of antagonizing authority figures.

"So what's the haps, baby bro? You look like a man on a mission."

"I'm leaving tomorrow." I couldn't meet his eyes. "I'm going up to McGill."

"McGill? Oh, right, right, right, the college. Yeah, Mom and Dad were real happy about that. Yeah, well, I'm proud of you, too, my man. You always were the smart one in the family."

It was hard to talk before. Now it was impossible.

"So listen, I'm leaving tomorrow, myself. In fact, I better start packin'." He began to assemble the cardboard and blankets into a slightly neater heap, and it dawned on me that this pile of garbage was his bedroll. "Yeah, I gotta job prospect down in DC—can't talk about it now, it's not a done deal yet, but if it works out the money'll be good and the weather's a whole lot better." He giggled, again flashing that gap in his teeth. He tied the bedroll with a couple of shoelaces and stood up, heaving it onto his shoulder.

"So!" Daniel stuck out his hand. "Good luck to both of us, eh? You're going to college in Canada, you better start talking like a Canuck, eh?"

I grabbed him and hugged him as hard as I could. He stiffened a little, then patted my back. Then he pushed me away and laughed.

"Jimmy, dude, don't act like it's farewell for all times, okay?" He started to walk away, then turned and pointed at me emphatically. "I'll see you when you come home at Thanksgiving, right?" he shouted. "We'll get together, shoot the shit. Promise?" I gave him a thumbs-up. "All right! It's a promise!" He gave a backward wave and disappeared around a corner.

I did come home for Thanksgiving. Daniel didn't. I haven't seen him since.

You and I met around Thanksgiving, didn't we? We sat next to each other for the keynote address of a conference in San Francisco. I was doing my best to appear interested in the speech, but you weren't even pretending to listen; once you got my attention, you delivered a series of observations about the speaker, some of them obscene, all of them funny. You spoke so quietly, your face so solemn, that the people around us couldn't tell what I was laughing at. When the speech ended you suggested we skip the first break-out session and have a drink. It was 10 o'clock in the morning. Against my better judgement I went, and that was the end of the conference for me. It was also the beginning of a relationship with a man I alternately want to strangle and protect, whose crude mannerisms and tactlessness are a constant source of embarrassment for me, whose daredevil approach to medicine scares me right down to the soles of my feet, whose drugging and drinking suggest a substance abuse problem requiring professional help—if you could be persuaded to seek it. Which seemed unlikely, until recently.

I know what the psychologists would say about my friendship with you. Transference. Enabling. Co-dependence. I couldn't save Daniel, so now I'm putting all my energy into making sure that I'll save you. I'm almost 40, though. I know better now. You can't save someone who doesn't want to be saved. You can't rescue a man who refuses to believe he's going under—or worse, who is determined to drown.

This, though; this is different. "Tell Cuddy I want ketamine." Maybe you're sick of floundering and getting battered against the rocks. Maybe you're ready to help yourself, for a change. I'm an optimistic oncologist—I'm unusually good at finding reasons for hope.


	7. Foreman

Foreman's first shift started at midnight, when he was to relieve Wilson. In the elevator on the way to the ICU, he recalled a conversation he'd had earlier that day, when he followed up on the patient with the swollen tongue. The case had gone to Steven Kerry, who took one look at the tongue and diagnosed a food allergy; a quick shot of ephedrine took care of it, just as Foreman predicted. The fever was unrelated—further examination revealed a nasty sinus infection, for which Kerry prescribed antibiotics. The patient went away happy and hadn't been heard from since.

"Pretty mundane stuff," said Kerry. "Why did House even bother with him?"

Foreman hesitated, remembering the amused cruelty in his boss' voice as he described making the hapless patient enunciate around his turgid tongue. And the poor guy was miserable with sinus pain on top of that. What an ass. Weren't those his last words to House before the shooter entered? "You're an ass."

"I don't know," Foreman lied. "He got shot before he could tell us."

"Huh." Kerry squinted at his shoes for a moment, then met Foreman's eyes. "House is a real dickhead," he shrugged. "But so are most doctors, when you get right down to it. House is just more upfront about it. If we started shooting all the dickhead doctors, we'd have half the profession up against the wall."

Foreman blinked hard. He was seized with a sudden desire to hug Kerry. Instead, he half-smiled at him. "Gotta go," he said. "It's my turn to watch the dickhead."

-0-

You never get a second chance to make a first impression, my dad always said. The day I interviewed for this job, I dressed for success in a three-season wool suit and crisp white shirt, my carefully-selected tie perfectly knotted, my wingtips polished. I shaved off my goatee and got a haircut the day before, so the razor lines would still be sharp. When I looked in the mirror, I saw the perfect realization of the American dream and a credit to my race.

Then I walked into your office and thought I have wandered into the janitors lounge. You wore a threadbare t-shirt from Pink Floyd's The Wall tour under a faded blue blazer that was fraying at the lapels and cuffs, and worn Levis. Your hair hadn't seen the inside of a barbershop in weeks, and you had two days' worth of stubble on your chin. The only sign that you weren't a crack addict in off the street was your footwear: those running shoes were nearly new, and they cost almost as much as my best shoes.

The shoes, and your eyes. I'd never felt so scrutinized in my life. You hadn't known me for 30 seconds at that point, but I knew if you had to pick me out of a lineup of well-dressed black men, you'd tap me without hesitating.

The whole package caught me off-balance, and when I sat down, I shot my cuffs—a nervous habit—exposing my wrists, and my tattoo. You didn't miss a beat.

"Nice tats. You don't see a lot of gang-bangers in neurology," you remarked.

"It's a Native American symbol. It means 'the force of life'," I said pleasantly. That usually shut down further inquiries from white professionals, who thrilled to the vision of a successful black man who was also in touch with Native American spirituality.

It didn't shut you down, though.

"Ah, yeah, Indian symbols. From the WeBeChillin' tribe, no doubt. I heard they have a reservation in North Philly."

"I grew up in West Oak Lane," I said stiffly.

"But you went to Central High School, in Olney," you parried. "Great school; lousy neighborhood. High crime rate, high poverty rate, surrounded by the ghe-tto. Lots of learning opportunities for a kid who wants to cultivate a little street; or did you always go straight home from school?"

Why didn't I get up and leave? I didn't have to take this, I wasn't short on good offers. I could have hopped on a train to any big city on the eastern seaboard and been treated like visiting royalty by every doctor and administrator on staff, not to mention the HR department. I could've flown to LA and my old job there—my boss would've welcomed me back with open arms.

You seemed to know that, too.

"Tell me this: You're a good-looking buck, your GPA is decent, your class standing is impressive, your thesis was only 40 percent crap—you could write your own ticket at any major medical center in the country, they're all hung up on diversity these days, they'd pay you to let them wipe your ass. Why are you applying for a two-bit fellowship at a teaching hospital?"

What was I supposed to say? The truth is, my thesis adviser had told me you were the biggest asshole he'd ever met and I'd probably want to run a knife through you before the first week was up, but you were the only doctor in the country who had anything to teach me about diagnostics. If he was as on the money about the second part as he was about the first, I might actually learn something here.

"You know us Affirmative Action kids," I said. "I slid right through medical school on liberal guilt. I just figured before I got the choice job and starting raking in the dough, I should pay some dues."

"So you're Catholic, too," you said. "What does your priest think about carjacking?"

I pretended bemusement. "Car jacking?"

"C'mon, you can't grow up around the hood without doing some crime. Tell me about your rap sheet."

My mother, who moved to Philadelphia from Alabama as a young woman, used to say she preferred Southern racism, which is upfront and leaves no room for confusion, to the northern style, which pretends to be colorblind while throwing up obstacles in every direction: housing, employment, education. There was no way you could have known about my criminal past: the records were sealed. So this must be good old-fashioned racist stereotyping. In a way, it was almost a relief. And you were wrong about my being Catholic—that was a relief, too. You weren't omniscient after all.

I said I didn't have a criminal record, which is true; it was expunged when I did my time. You leaned forward and raised that very point. I lost my temper and reminded you that we were supposed to confine ourselves to topics that were relevant to the position.

"You never know what might turn out to be relevant," you said, sitting back in your chair and regarding me like a big, self-satisfied cat. "An ex-gangbanger who knows how to hotwire a car and still look like a poster boy for Equal Opportunity might come in handy sometime."

At that moment I knew I wouldn't work for you even if the alternative was starving. And I assumed you wouldn't hire me even if it meant you had to do all your work yourself.

So I couldn't believe it when I got your offer a week later. Even harder to believe: I accepted it.

Because that day in your office, I would have gladly shot you myself.

When I first came back to work after the _naegleria_infection, I was determined to take life as it came, to accept what I couldn't change and make the best of any limitations resulting from the biopsy you didn't want to do. I was just going to be grateful for another chance at life. I started off by giving Cameron, who was still sore over the article mess, a big hug. I thought I was doing great—until I looked over her shoulder and saw your face.

You weren't fooled by my act, any more than you were fooled by my easy lie about the gang ink. I felt you even knew that I was two hours late that day because I couldn't figure out how to tie my shoes. I had the ends of two laces in my hands, I knew they were supposed to go together in a way that would keep my shoes on my feet, but how? You knew I was incapacitated, and you knew I wasn't really okay with that knowledge. You were a complete asshole to me that day, nagging and pushing, tearing away my complacency, trying to get me to push back. You won, of course. You always win.

People ask me how I can stand to work for you when I could go anywhere in the country and be appreciated and treated with respect. That's true, but after two years at Princeton-Plainsboro, conventional appreciation and respect have less value for me than they used to. From the day I put my mind to becoming a doctor instead of a career criminal, everyone I've met has smoothed my path, offered me help, been eager to clothe me in the outward signs of success—the degrees, the medical license, the honors and prizes. Until I came here, I was happy to go along with all that. But you had ambitions for what was inside me—the grit and nerve and intellectual curiousity that I didn't even know was there, the stuff that separates the really great doctors from the country club dabblers. You wouldn't settle for anything short of maximized potential. And you wouldn't let me settle, either.

Before I worked with you, I was a guy with a medical degree. By the time I leave, I'll be a doctor.


	8. Stacy

Short Hills, New Jersey is a bedroom community whose denizens spend the better parts of their lives somewhere else, returning to their well-appointed homes only to rest and recharge their energies for another overscheduled day. Accordingly, most houses are dark by midnight. It is very rare to find someone sitting on their patio smoking a cigarette at two o'clock in the morning.

However, this particular night was marked by the sharp snap of a match on a matchbook and a flare of light that briefly illuminated the unhappy face of a woman in her late 40s, sitting with her back to her own well-appointed house. If anyone had been watching, they would have had just enough time to see that she was dark-eyed and beautiful and hollow-cheeked with grief. Then she shook the flame out, and all that could be seen was the glowing tip of the cigarette as it described a regular arc between her face and an empty coffee can next to the chair she was sitting on.

She had just dropped the stub into the can when a light came on in a ground-floor room. The woman tensed, but continued to stare into the darkness ahead. A moment later, a man leaning on an aluminum walker appeared in the doorway.

"Stacy? Are you okay?"

"Not really."

Mark Warner stepped gingerly out onto the patio. "Is there anything I can do?"

"No. I just need to process. Go back to bed, Mark, you've got work in the morning."

He leaned forward, sniffing the air incredulously. "Have you been smoking?"

"Yeah." She fumbled in her robe pocket, produced a half-empty pack of Marlboro Lights, and held it up where he could see it.

"How long has this been going on?"

"About eight months."

"Wow. You're full of secrets, aren't you?" He caught himself and added, "We should talk about this at our next session."

"Right. We wouldn't want to try to have a conversation about something real without Pat Leary there to referee."

Silence. Mark turned back to the house, then paused.

"I don't know how much longer I can go on like this, Stacy."

"Me either," she said, and shook out another cigarette. The house went dark again. She lit up and inhaled deeply.

Mark Warner is a good man. A kind man. He didn't deserve to get so sick. It wasn't his fault that the rehabilitation phase took so long, was so painful, required him to be pushed around in a wheelchair like a toddler in a stroller. Anyone would have become frustrated and occasionally lashed out at the closest person. That's not a reason to fall into bed with an old lover.

And that wasn't the reason. I went to your apartment that night for the same reason I went to your apartment the first time—because I wanted to be with you, wanted it so much that I ignored every alarm and warning shout from my undersized conscience and my overeducated brain. I shut them right down and went, first time and every time. It was always a prelude to disaster, but the prelude was the only thing that mattered to me, and five years with you taught me that most disasters can be survived.

You always tell people we met somewhere squalid—a strip club, a wet t-shirt contest, doing shots off the bartender's navel at a roadhouse. All lies. We met at a very nice restaurant in Manhattan, where you proceeded to drink too much and become utterly obnoxious. You called me Scarlett and imitated my accent, which was still pretty thick in those days. I couldn't believe Jimmy Wilson would hook me up with such a butthead. I wrote you off before the entrees arrived, and left unshaken in my belief that there were no decent unmarried men in New York.

The next day you called and asked me out again. "I think you owe it to me," you explained.

I was stunned. "On what grounds?"

"None whatsoever," you said. "I just happen to think you do."

An hour later the flowers arrived. The note read, "Now you owe me a date and a thank-you call." Instead of your signature, you wrote your phone number.

I laughed. I called. We met at a restaurant where they made us sit in the bar while we waited for our table, and we left before we finished our first drink. Four hours later, we ordered in Chinese and ate it in bed while we watched the end of a Cubs game. Six days later I moved in.

I was in my mid-thirties. I wasn't naive. What little I knew about you at that point—that you were brilliant but a loose cannon, that you'd been fired three times already and were on thin ice with your current employer, that you liked to party too much, never bothered to couch your opinions in tact, and had never had a girlfriend for longer than a few months—wasn't encouraging. I was told about your egotism, your self-centeredness, your tendency to obsess over a case to the exclusion of everything else, and I didn't doubt any of it. My older sister Karen disliked you from the start. "If you think this is the guy who'll make all your dreams come true, think again," she said. "The only dreams he's interested in are his own." I thought she was probably right.

I didn't know then about your black depressions, the periods of self-loathing and feelings of worthlessness, but that wouldn't have stopped me, either. Somehow you had gotten to me, bulled your way right through the irony and cynicism I used to scare away unwanted suitors and set up a place for yourself in my life that no one else was ever able to fill, before or since.

That night in the restaurant bar you were sober but only a little less obnoxious. "Attraction is such a ridiculously complicated business in this culture," you said, holding my gaze with yours. "You meet a woman, she's beautiful, she's smart, funny; she's got gorgeous knockers and the sweetest, roundest ass in the five boroughs, all you want to do is take her home and drill her into the mattress, but if you say any of that to her before the prescribed formalities are observed, the rules say she has to slap you and storm away."

I was amazed. "You really are a jerk," I said.

"I know," you said, and the rueful amusement in your tone told me that this, at least, was from the heart: you really were aware of the full extent of your crudeness, and regretted it, but not enough to try and change it.

"Try this," I suggested. "Pay me a compliment that doesn't make me sound like a Playboy bunny. See where it gets you."

You looked me over thoughtfully, your face softening. You reached across the table and touched the crucifix I've worn every day of my life since my mother gave it to me.

"That's a pretty necklace," you said, and gently turned it over. "He couldn't see," you explained.

I came to live for moments like that.

There weren't a lot of them. You really were unbelievably self-absorbed; we could spend hours together in a room and, unless we were in bed, you might as well have been alone for all the notice you took of me. When you had an interesting case, I became a footnote in your life, left to my own devices for days at a time. If we had social plans, seven times out of ten you couldn't make it at all, and of the three remaining times, at least one would be interrupted when your pager called you back to work. I used to accuse you of willing it to go off.

We fought about this. Or, rather, I fought—you just tightened your lips and drifted away, sometimes mentally, sometimes physically. There were nights when you didn't come home from work, and I'd find out that you'd spent them in a bar, returning to the hospital to sleep in your office. I spent so much time by myself, it became hard to think of us as a couple.

But I stayed, because there were still those moments. When I had your attention, I had all of it; you concentrated on me, talked to me, listened to me as if you had been waiting all your life to hear just what I had to say. "I'm a jerk," you would remind me, and then you would undermine the warning by bringing me flowers and taking me to beautiful dinners at good restaurants, or just spending an evening on the couch watching TV with your head in my lap.

Then the phone would ring, and you'd be off again. Sometimes it was to attend to a life or death situation, but more often it was a transparent excuse to get away. It was as if you were afraid to let yourself be too happy—you always had to break off at some point, isolate yourself. Were you afraid that loving me too much might rob you of your strength? Or was this a way of diminishing what we had so that if you lost it, you wouldn't be completely undone by the pain?

Around the fourth year we were together, Karen gave me a copy of Graham Greene's The End of the Affair for my birthday. I was furious with her. "Why not just embroider "Dump Greg" on a pillow?" I asked.

"Stacy," she said firmly, "I know nothing I can say will make you believe this, but I wasn't even thinking of Greg when I bought it. It's a good story. I thought you might like it. If you can't get past the title, go ahead and regift it, and I'll get you a nice scarf instead."

I fully intended to give it away, but one night when you finally called around 11 to say you weren't coming home, I pulled it out and started to read it. I finished it around four a.m., wishing I'd never opened it. I identified completely with Sarah Miles, the serial adulteress who made a deal with God that she refused to break, even though it cost her her life. Sarah's lover was a bitterly unhappy man named Maurice Bendrix, who refused to believe in her love, who craved her presence but said and did cruel things to her to test the limits of her attachment to him. They met in wartime London, during the Blitz, and one night a bomb fell on Bendrix's house while Sarah was there. Bendrix was half-buried in the rubble and Sarah, finding him, was certain he was dead. A lapsed Catholic, she dropped to her knees and asked God to let him live again—to give him another chance at happiness in life—and promised in return to give him up for good. Bendrix turned out to be alive, and Sarah, keeping her side of the bargain, took herself out of his life. He never forgave her.

A year after that, you were hospitalized with an undiagnosed blockage in the blood supply to your leg. Because it had been overlooked for so long, the surrounding tissue had begun to die. Your doctors recommended amputation. You refused, insisting that the blockage be removed instead. The days that followed were a nightmare. I know you're a doctor, and no stranger to medical crises, but have you ever watched someone you love writhing and screaming in pain? At one point your heart stopped. Do you know what it feels like to watch your beloved one fall through the ice and be saved, only to see him venture out to where the ice is even thinner?

I know you believed with all your heart that you could still come out of hell with both legs intact. I feared that what really motivated you was the secret conviction that you were already so deficient, you could not afford a physical disability. I was afraid you were going to die without ever finding out how wrong you were about yourself, and how happy it was possible for you to be. I thought: maybe I can't bring you to realize those things, but someone else might. And you need to be alive in order to find her.

Was I thinking of Sarah Miles when I told Lisa to operate? I knew how you felt about having your orders overturned; I knew you would react with the same fury you showed to anyone who thwarted you, and this time it would be directed at me. I knew it might mean the end. But you would be alive. And I couldn't be certain that that would be the case if we followed your orders. When it came to the moment of decision, I chose the course that offered the greatest assurance that your life would go on, with or without me.

I suppose it was inevitable that you would find another opportunity to use your own body to test a pet theory. When Lisa told me that you had been shot, I was shocked, stunned. When she told me that you had requested an unproven treatment with a staff that has no training in the procedure and no back up assistance if something goes wrong, I was merely resigned.

It's not a peaceful resignation. The last time you were in critical condition, there were things I could do; I could sit by you and soothe you, mediate between you and the staff, keep your parents informed. This time I have no role at all, no way of caring for you or even seeing you just to reassure myself that you are all right.

I can't even pray. I'm not Sarah Miles—I don't believe. It's just as well—even now, I couldn't promise God to give you up forever and really mean it.


	9. Cuddy

Chase staggered into House's room at around 3 a.m. with a severe case of bedhead and a stiff neck, indications that he had been sleeping on one of the miserable cots in the residents' lounge. He peered blearily at the monitors and snapped to full attention.

"He's got a fever," he observed.

"Low-grade," Foreman answered, flipping through a magazine.

"How long has he had it?"

"About an hour, an hour and a half. It's on the chart."

Chase seized the chart and began poring over the notes. "It's gone up since then! Why didn't you call me?"

"Wake you up for a 100.2? I was right here to keep an eye on it. It hasn't gone up that much."

"It hasn't gone down, either," Chase fumed. "You have to let me know these things!"

"I'm a doctor too, you know," Foreman pointed out.

"And I'm in charge of his care."

"All right, all right, sorry. Next time he hiccups I'll sound the red alert. I'll even haul you off the can if I have to."

"Will you get serious? He's just had surgery for two filthy gunshot wounds, he's flat on his back, on a respirator, immobile—he's a sitting duck for peritonitus or a staph infection!"

"Chase, will you chill? You're right, we have to be more careful than usual, but this was a subjective judgement call and there was no harm done."

_Mistakes are as serious as the results they cause._

"Right," Chase said tightly. "Cuddy made a judgement call and now he can't walk. Urquhart made a judgement call and now he can't talk. We're running out of ways to screw him up, Foreman. The next judgement call could be the one that takes him out!" He began drawing blood samples.

"What're you doing now?"

"I'm gonna run some tests, make sure nothing's going on here."

"You don't have to do that now—whatever it is, it's not going anywhere tonight. Go back to bed, do it in the morning."

"I'd rather know what's going on now, if you don't mind." The tension in Chase's voice was unmistakable now.

Foreman stared at his colleague for a moment without speaking. Then, "Man, you better ease up a little. You're gonna make yourself sick if you keep it up like this."

"A little responsibility never killed anyone," Chase muttered, as he left the room with his little rack of House blood.

-0-

Cuddy arrived for her shift an hour later, armed with a stack of printer's proofs for the hospital's annual report and a red felt-tipped pen. She looked around the room at Chase's handiwork.

"Is this an ICU or an opium den?" she asked.

Foreman rose and stretched. "Chase insisted. He says ketamine coma patients can drift in and out of consciousness. They have vivid dreams. Bright lights and loud noises can make them worse; having something pleasant to look at helps them relax."

"That's a lot more consideration than House deserves," Cuddy growled. "Look at the way he's treated poor Mr. Wentworth all this time. What we really should do is have a four-course dinner party on his stomach. Spaghetti marinara and garlic bread. And make sure to get lots of crumbs between the sheets."

Foreman grinned. "We could have some fun with this," he acknowledged.

"Could we!" Cuddy exclaimed. She leaned toward the bed and raised her voice. "House! We're gonna shave your head and give you a makeover. Do you want to look like Bette Davis or Marilyn Monroe?"

Weirdly, the EEG monitor recorded a sudden burst of activity. Cuddy and Foreman regarded it silently for a moment, then Cuddy laughed.

"Maybe this is the worst punishment of all," she said. "He's thought of a really good comeback, and he can't deliver it."

The first time you ever spoke to me, it was to deliver an insult. I was dressed in my freshman college-girl best—oversized sweatshirt, tights, leg warmers, and high-top aerobics shoes, my hair in an off-center ponytail—and you looked me over with amused lechery and said "The boobs and butt are right, but you've got the biggest nose I've ever seen on a JAP."

What an asshole. God, you were obnoxious. An obnoxious asshole. You still are, even when you're not drunk and stoned, which you certainly were that night.

It was the first dorm "mixer" of the new academic year, and everyone was trying to get in maximum face time. I had just received word that my high-school boyfriend had already been seen in the company of some blonde dimbo—an unforgivable transgression—so I was anxious to find someone of my own to transgress with. I had seen you assessing me from across the roiling crowd in the TV lounge and was drawn into your orbit by those incredibly blue eyes and the knowing grin on your face. Bad move. With one word, you took yourself off my list of Possibles—at least for that night. Lips that call me a Jewish American Princess will never touch mine. Besides, I ended up drinking too many Planters Punches and passing out on the co-ed bathroom floor after throwing up everything I'd ever eaten and then some.

We met again at another party, this time in an off-campus house rented by a bunch of kids in the Pre-Med Student Association. I was there as a member. I don't know why you were there—you already were a medical student. My guess is you were drawn by the refreshments, which included a rancid concoction of Hawiian Punch and grain alcohol mixed in a garbage can. Anxious to avoid further anti-Semitic slurs, I tried to stay out of your range all evening, and I might have succeeded if that girl hadn't fallen down the concrete back steps, shattering her glass into a hundred pieces and opening a deep cut in her arm.

You would think a student organization composed entirely of future doctors would harbor at least a couple of members who knew what to do, but the grain alcohol had done its work well and most of the party guests—including me—stood gaping as the girl screamed and blood gushed onto the grass. Finally a boy ran up with a filthy towel and wrapped it tightly around the wound, causing the girl to stop screaming and start shrieking.

"What the fuck are you doing? Stop, wait, there's probably glass in there, Dildo!" You pushed through the crowd, shoved Towel Boy out of the way, unwrapped the arm, and held it under the porch light. You peered into the wound, then turned and looked straight at me.

"You—Japzilla, with the nice tits—get over here."

Pretending to be unruffled by the situation or your nasty attitude, I stepped forward. The girl had stopped shrieking, probably because she was on the verge of fainting. You helped her sit down on the top step. I bent over her arm and got my first look at a deep laceration with arterial bleeding. The meat of her arm was laid wide open, and I thought I saw the radius—or was it the ulna?—showing greenly through the gore. I noted with interest that the wound sparkled under the lights, reflecting the surface of dozens of tiny shards of glass, just before everything went grey and I started to pitch forward.

You grabbed my arm—not roughly, just firmly—and said, "Snap out of it, Cuddy, I need your help here."

How did you know that calling me by name would put the starch back in my spine? (How did you know my name, anyway?) I was suddenly sober, clear-headed, calm. I looked into the ugly gash, this time with professional interest, then at you, awaiting orders.

You looked back approvingly. "I need tweezers and a lighter. No, forget the lighter—I've got one." You fished a Bic out of your jeans pocket and held your other hand toward me. "Tweezers."

Why would you think I had tweezers? At a party? Isn't that stereotyping? But of course I did, and I fumbled them out of my purse. You took them from me without a word and wrapped the tail of your shirt around the handle while you sterilized the tips with the lighter.

"Okay, now hold her arm like this, under the light, where I can see it—like that. Don't let her jerk it away." The girl watched with dull interest as you delicately extracted the splinters of glass, probing lightly to make sure you got them all. I noticed that you had beautiful hands, with long, slim, sensitive fingers—perfect hands for a doctor, I told myself, trying to ignore a sudden flush of heat at the sight of them. What does it mean to get hot for a man who is digging chunks of beer mug out of another woman's arm?

Towel Boy reappeared with a bottle of grain alcohol and made as if to pour the contents over the operation site. "Antiseptic," he stammered helpfully. Without even looking at him, you grabbed the bottle and pushed him off the steps.

"Do your future patients a favor," you advised him, still examining the wound for remaining sparkles. "Switch majors. You'll cause a lot less damage as a history teacher."

To me you said, "Alcohol, hydrogen peroxide, and all the other shit people want to pour into cuts just slow down the healing. All this needs is soap and water. Keep her arm elevated while I get her back on her feet, and let's check the bathrooms." Between us, we got the patient inside, sat her on the toilet seat, and lavaged the cut with warm water and oatmeal soap—all we could find.

"Why do people want to wash themselves with food?" you asked, as you tore off the wrapper. "Well, at least she won't get dry skin."

Ten minutes later the patient's arm was neatly wrapped in a clean towel, and her boyfriend—who had been hanging around the periphery of the action the whole time ("Blood is like my worst thing. I thought I was gonna hurl," he confided, adding, "I'm pre-law." "You'll never make it as a lawyer if you don't develop a taste for blood," you said.)—was driving her to the emergency room.

I felt like I'd single-handedly saved a village from the plague; I felt like I could cure cancer; I felt like a _doctor_. I looked around the remaining guests, wanting to share this incredible rush with you, knowing you would understand. But you'd slipped away shortly after fastening the makeshift bandage with a couple of elastic headbands. I'm pretty sure you took the bottle of grain alcohol with you. And although I went to every party I was invited to and searched each crowd hopefully, I didn't see you again for the rest of that year.

When we did bump into each other again, it was at a rowdy bar downtown. Amazingly, you were there with a girl, a tall slender blonde whose beauty was somewhat diminished by her dazed expression and the fact that her pupils were the size of quarters.

You were stoned, too, but still in command of yourself. "Japzilla!" you shouted boisterously, flinging an arm around me. "Darlene, this is Lisa Cuddy."

Darlene turned heavy eyes in my direction and gazed in an unfocused way over my shoulder. She made an enormous effort to smile at me, failed, and let her attention lapse inward again.

"Cuddy wants to be a doctor," you announced. "Or better yet, marry one."

I'd had a few beers myself; that, and the insult—okay, and maybe the disappointment of seeing you with a female companion after all this time—brought out my inner bitch. I'd spent months thinking about those moments we'd shared over the girl's lacerated arm. Obviously they had meant nothing to you at all.

"No way I'd marry a doctor," I snorted. "Guys who go into medicine are the biggest macho shitheads in the world."

I expected you to bristle, hit back with something really hurtful, but you just laughed and squeezed me affectionately.

"Don't you worry, Japzilla," you said. "You're gonna be a doctor. And who knows—you might decide that a macho shithead is exactly what you want."


	10. Blythe

John and Blythe House had volunteered to sit with their son during the 8am to noon shift. It wasn't easy to convince Chase to give a pair of laymen responsibility for monitoring a man who was out cold and wired to computers that tracked his every breath, but Cuddy insisted. The cabal in charge of this experiment needed time to attend to their regular duties, she said; the morning shift offered the best odds that help would be on the way the moment the Houses called for it, and Chase really needed to get off his high horse and uncurl his fingers from this case a little.

The Houses arrived half an hour early, fully equipped for their vigil with magazines, books, and a needlework project (hers). Blythe House entered the room briskly, a brave smile on her face, but at the sight of her son she halted, the smile draining away. "Oh," she said, and put a hand to her mouth. Her eyes filled with tears.

Cuddy put a firm but gentle arm around her shoulders and turned her back out into the hallway. John House followed, looking stormy.

"He looks like he's...dead," Blythe whispered. The tears began to overflow their banks.

"I know it's a little frightening at first," Cuddy said softly, handing her a Kleenex, "but believe me, he's doing fine."

"You've got him wired like a Christmas tree," boomed House pere. "Just how dangerous is this little experiment?"

Cuddy drew a breath. "Try to remember that he can probably hear you," she said evenly. "He might even open his eyes from time to time and look at you; he did it a couple of times earlier this morning. It's nothing to be alarmed about, in fact it's a good sign, but it's important to remember that ketamine can induce hallucinations. You don't want to say or do anything that might make them worse."

Blythe pulled herself together and they reentered the room. Blythe's attention was drawn to the computer monitor, silently running through the slideshow Chase and Cameron had produced from the boxes in the filing cabinets and images "borrowed" from fansites for House's favorite TV shows.

"Oh, look, John, it's Greg with the catamaran. Remember how he loved that boat?"

"He didn't love working on it," John growled, but his face softened as he regarded the image. "He was a born sailor, I'll give him that. He almost gave us heart attacks, the way he'd fly across the lake on that thing."

Chase entered the room with a sheaf of lab reports and a vial of medicine. He greeted the Houses and turned to Cuddy.

"Nothing showed up," he told her, "but I'm going to draw more bloods around noon just to make sure."

"His temperature's gone down," Cuddy pointed out.

"If it goes up again, then," Chase said impatiently.

House, rousing briefly, kicked the sheet off his feet, exposing what looked like very thick stockings. His father was appalled.

"You've got him in pantyhose?" he asked.

"They're compression stockings," Chase explained. "They help to prevent blood clots from forming in his legs and moving to his lungs." He moved to the IV unit and injected something from the vial into the line.

"What are you giving him?" Blythe asked anxiously.

"Anti-ulcer meds," Chase said. "You notice we've got the head of his bed elevated, too. It's to prevent acid reflux from pushing into his lungs—it's standard procedure to avoid ventilator-acquired pneumonia."

"I never knew sleeping could be so dangerous," marveled John.

"It's not, really," Chase said quickly. "But we want to avoid problems if we can." He handed John House a slip of paper with the number for his pager. "Don't be shy about using this," he instructed him solemnly. "I'll be around the whole time, and if you need to talk to me for any reason, give me a buzz. It doesn't have to be an emergency; call if you just want to chat."

"That goes for me, too," Cuddy reminded them. She and Chase departed, leaving the House family alone.

Blythe set out the magazines they'd brought and fussed with the contents of her needlework kit in preparation for settling in for the morning. Her husband approached the bed and stood gazing at his sleeping son's face.

"You really did it this time, kiddo," he said ruefully. "I used to wonder what you could do to top the leg. I should've known you'd think of something."

Blythe spoke sharply. "John."

He winced and turned. His face suddenly looked very old to her. She relented.

"Would you get me a cup of tea, dear? You know the way to the cafeteria, don't you?"

When her husband had left, Blythe pushed a chair close to the bed and sank into it. She picked up her son's free hand in both of hers and held the palm to her lips, then pressed it against her cheek. She brushed the hair from his forehead and kissed that, too.

-0-

I had to wait until you were unconscious to do this. You never liked me to kiss and hug you—even as a baby you pushed me away, so busy learning about the world, so anxious to get on with the next adventure. It was just you and me back then. Dad was in Germany then. We would have been with him, but I had such a difficult pregnancy, he wanted me to be near my family and the good hospitals where they lived, not taking my chances in a military hospital. We made it through the delivery all right, but I was told there would be no more children.

Maybe that's where it allwent wrong—if I could have given you some brothers and sisters, you wouldn't have had to carry all of our parental expectations and anxieties by yourself.

As it was, Dad decided not to spend another tour away from you and miss any more of your growing up. For one thing, he didn't trust me to raise you the way he thought a boy should be raised. He first saw you when you were six months old. You were a strong-willed baby, so energetic and curious about everything. You couldn't crawl yet, but you could pull yourself around by your forearms and roll from one side of the room to the other, and you didn't like to be interferred with when you were exploring. If I picked you up you would bellow like a bull and try to wriggle out of my arms; once or twice you tried to scramble over my shoulder like a cat to get free. You were so strong and wiry, I was always on the verge of dropping you.

Dad frowned when he saw this happen and stepped in to take you away. You roared, wailed, stiffened and pushed with all your might, but Dad held on grimly and eventually you wore yourself out and hung, defeated, in his hands. By that time I was in tears, too.

"He has to learn, Blythe," he said.

"He's just a baby!" I protested.

"This is the perfect time to start nipping bad habits in the bud." He sounded so sure of this, and I was so exhausted from trying to keep up with you by myself, that I let him take over.

Maybe that was the mistake. From that day on, your relationship was a constant battle; for the upper hand on his side, for the right to do things your own way on yours. But I honestly didn't see any alternative. You were already such a challenge at six months, I couldn't imagine what you would be like once you hit the "terrible twos." As it was, even your father's best efforts couldn't keep you out of trouble. He told you not to rush up to strange dogs, and at age five you went up to the meanest dog on the base and nearly got your nose bitten off. He told you not to climb the rotted branches of the old apple tree in the backyard of our place in San Diego, and you did anyway and broke your arm. He told you to make your horse walk back to the stables after a ride out to the pyramids in Egypt, and you immediately kicked the animal into a headlong gallop that ended when it jumped over the gate into its corral and you fell off, cracking three ribs and breaking your collarbone. He warned you not to take the little 14-foot sailboat we had in Florida out of the marina on a stormy day, and you sneaked out anyway, lost control of the boom, and wound up in the hospital with a concussion.

Looking back, I think that two things came of those injuries. One, you became fascinated with hospitals, doctors, and everything to do with medicine, even needles—you never cried when you needed a shot. Second, you grew to hate having anything go wrong with your body.

I remember taking you back to kindergarten after the dog bite. Two little girls were walking towards us in the hallway, and when they saw your swollen, pieced-together little face, they began to giggle. "His face is sewed on," one whispered to the other.

Well, I never would have thought I could harbor evil thoughts about a five-year-old child, but I hated that little girl for being so cruel to my son. And you—you seemed to shrink into yourself, you looked so ashamed. After that, you couldn't bear to have your injuries pointed out and discussed, as if they were visible proof of failure. That day in the hallway I tried to explain that the girls didn't realize how hurtful it was to be laughed at, but you weren't so sure. "No," you said, "they're just mean. And they never liked me anyway."

You seemed to think a lot of children didn't like you. I wasn't so sure. You were a handsome little boy, athletic and imaginative, funny and bright, but you were impatient with children who couldn't keep up with you physically or mentally, and you had a tendency to pick up friends and drop them the minute you found something more interesting to do. Children will only put up with that kind of treatment for so long. We moved every two years, so you always had a chance to start fresh, but within weeks we'd hear from your teachers that your classmates had decided you were stuck up and "superior."

We heard from your teachers all the time. Every marking period brought the same parent-teacher conferences and the same refrain: "Greg is bright and could make top grades, if ony he would apply himself." In between report cards there were notes home and the occasional telephone call. You never got less than a B-plus on a test, but you never handed in homework. Your papers were praised for the depth of your research, the clarity of your writing, and the originality of your ideas, but you lost points because they were handed in on scrap paper in an almost illegible scrawl—you had written many of them on the bus the morning they were due. You were teaching yourself physics in sixth grade and calculus in seventh, but your grade point average hovered around a 2.5.

You seemed to regard your deficiencies as too trivial to correct. "If my paper was that good, why does my handwriting matter?" you would grumble. You were outraged when you lost the science fair competition in ninth grade. Your exhibit was startling and very advanced—I certainly didn't understand it—but first prize went to a boy whose entry demonstrated how a volcano worked.

"Greg should have won," the high school chemistry teacher confided to us, "but the rules said the exhibit had to be accompanied by a neatly-printed poster explaining it, and he neglected to make one."

"I wanted to make an oral presentation," you explained to us later. "No one would have understood anything I put on a poster anyway. It made more sense to demonstrate it and take questions afterward. I can't believe they picked Norman Elwood 's dorky volcano just because he made a stupid poster and I didn't."

I saw your point. Maybe Dad did, too, but he sided with the judges: "Rules are there for a reason, Greg. Next time, try doing what you're told instead of expecting the world to make an exception for you."

Was that the problem? I know you have a reputation for bending and sometimes breaking the rules. I know you've lost jobs because of it. Sometimes you do manage to bully people into making an exception for you, and it seems to have helped you in your career. But what about the rest of your life?

-0-

John House returned with the tea and, seeing his wife lost in thought, set the cup on the counter and settled into a chair as quietly as he could.

-0-

I've been watching the slideshow on thecomputer screen here. It's run through the same pictures at least twice now, and I can see that most of them are from television shows or magazines about motorcycles and sports. Besides the one of the catamaran, there are only a few pictures of you, all in a professional setting, and none of anyone I recognize as a friend. I know it upsets you when I talk about your personal life. I am proud of what you've achieved as a doctor, but I think of you as a whole person, not just a specialist in diseases. You have these colleagues, who seem very fond of you, but they must have lives of their own. You have us, but we won't be around forever. Who will you talk to when you go home at night? Who will take care of you when you're ill?

Why won't you at least talk about these things? I just learned yesterday from that nice black doctor that Stacy spent six months working here at the hospital last winter. She was working here when we stopped by on our way to Europe, and you never said a word. You barely said a word when she left you six years ago. "It was a mutual decision," you told us, your face as hard as stone. You were together for five years. I could tell how much you loved each other, and I prayed that you would recognize the wisdom of some middleclass conventions and marry her. "I guess Greg's not the marrying kind," Stacy told me once. She's married now, and you're alone. You must have some feelings about that.

"Mom, I'm fine. I'm just very busy." That's your reason for everything, isn't it? It's why you don't seem to have anything else going on in your life, it's why you don't return my calls for days, it's why you always look so thin and tired. I suppose you could be telling the truth. I know a doctor doesn't have a lot of time to himself. But I can't get over the feeling that you're in some kind of trouble, and that you'd really rather risk dying than tell me what it is.

-0-

There was a light knock on the doorframe and Cameron entered the room, her eyes sparkling. Wilson followed close behind.

"Dr. Wilson is going to sit with him for a minute," she told the Houses, her voice bright with excitement. "There's something you two really have to see."


	11. John

JOHN

The crime scene tape had come down the afternoon before and the bloodstains reduced to pale shadows on the carpet, but the team still avoided the diagnostics department conference room. For one thing, they didn't have an active case. More to the point, no one wanted to pick up a marker and stand at the whiteboard, inviting comparisons with the maestro.

But somehow all three decided more or less simultaneously to go there that morning and begin trying to restore their world to normal. They sat around the table sipping coffee and making nervous conversation, half expecting House to suddenly appear in a burst of energetic limping, a blast of acidic verbiage preceding him like a fanfare.

Instead, Cuddy showed up at around 10 o'clock at the head of what appeared to be a Mardi Gras parade. The team stood back as a stream of orderlies and deliverymen cycled through House's office, leaving a wild assortment of flowers, gift baskets, and mylar balloon bouquets in their wake. Cuddy remained behind, surveying the haul.

"What happened?" Cameron gasped.

"I upgraded House to satisfactory condition last night," said Cuddy, "and as soon as it appeared in the news stories, these started coming in. Happens all the time when we get a high-profile patient." She added, wryly, "I guess people were waiting to see whether they should send Get Well flowers or funeral bouquets."

The team began inspecting the gifts. "Carly Forlano?" asked Cameron.

"Ipecac Woman," said Foreman. Chase winced.

"Oh, look, flowers from Lucy Palmeiro. And a note from Luke!" Cameron laughed and read, "Mom told me she was the one who narked on me to Social Services. So we're cool, okay? Hope you get better fast."

"Balloons from the Alston family. And a drawing of House by Ian." Foreman held up a childish sketch of what appeared to be an irritable porcupine with a stethoscope.

Chase opened a box and pulled out a goggly-eyed creature in blue plush. "Now you can tell everyone you got the clap from a Munchausen's patient. Anica Jovanovich," he read, puzzled. Foreman grabbed the toy and read the tag.

"It's a stuffed microbe," he grinned. "_Neisseria gonorrhoeae_. House'll love it." Cameron groaned.

"We should put it in bed with him," said Chase. "Tell him he got the clap in his sleep. See if he can figure it out."

"I can't believe this," Cameron said wonderingly. "So many people act as if they can't stand him—"

"There are plenty of those out there, too," Cuddy assured her dryly. "You're only seeing the good stuff. The hate mail started yesterday morning. But most of it seems to be from the usual whack jobs who come out of the woodwork whenever something awful happens. We get that with our high-profile cases, too."

"Which category do you put this in?" asked Foreman, scanning the card from an elaborate gift basket. "'If anyone has a right to shoot you, it's me,'" he read. "'Get well soon, because I still want a chance to kick your ass someday. Sincerely, Edward Vogler.'"

"House won't be able to eat any of this stuff for weeks," commented Chase, scrutinizing the label on a tin of caviar. "Vogler should know that."

"He probably does," said Foreman. "That's probably why he chose it."

"Who are 'Dry Cleaner,' 'Bus Stop,' and 'Tax Accountant'?" asked Cameron.

"House's poker group," said Wilson, entering. He stepped back for the full effect. "Wow."

"' We figure the guy caught you dealing from the bottom of the deck,'" Cameron read. "'Quit goldbricking and get back in the game.' They must be really close."

"The shame of it is, most of the flowers and balloons will have wilted by the time House wakes up again," Cuddy sighed.

"He can read the cards, though," said Foreman. "He'd probably go into sugar shock if he saw the real thing anyway. He's not big on sentimental stuff."

Cameron was looking around the room thoughtfully.

"No," she said, "but I know someone who is; and someone else who really needs to see this."

-0-

Blythe House clutched Cameron's arm when she saw the display.

"Oh," she breathed. "Oh, look, John!" Cuddy handed her a few carefully pre-screened cards. Blythe read them quickly, fumbling for a Kleenex. "How wonderful. You know, he never talks about what he does all day. I had no idea—"

"He's saved a lot of lives," said Cameron. "People come to him when everyone else has given up on them. They don't forget."

"No...oh, I wish he could see this! But what is this little blue furry thing supposed to be?"

The team clustered around her, trying to draw her attention to more conventional gifts. John House stood alone in the center of the room, taking in the view. Then, unobserved, he slipped out the door again.

-0-

He returned to the ICU and took a seat at the foot of the bed. From that vantage point he could see his son's pale, slackened face and the monitors that dispassionately recorded the beating of his heart and measured his breathing. John chose to fixate on the screens as he had once fixated on the instrument panel when flying in bad weather. As long as the gauges continued to provide solid, factual information, there was a chance of a safe landing.

-0-

Flying was the only thing I ever managed to teach you. Flying and sailing. Not that you couldn't have learned without me. "A born stick-and-rudder man," my friends all said, after watching you ace your first solo flight. But I like to think I had something to do with it.

Other than that, you pretty much created yourself. You were already six months into the job when I showed up in your life, and you made it clear you weren't interested in my help. I'd spent the whole flight over from Germany dreaming about you and all the father-son stuff we'd do together. You'd inherit my speed and good hands for football and Momma's good looks and book smarts. We'd go camping and fishing and I'd teach you to shoot. I knew Momma would have liked our only child to be a girl, and I pretended to sympathize, but all the time I was singing inside: I have a son, I have a son, I've got me a boy.

Then I got my first look at you. You looked right back at me with those spooky blue eyes of yours, and I knew right way I was outgunned. I didn't think a baby could stare like that—you seemed to be measuring me, and not thinking much of what you saw.

I could see right away that you'd been giving your momma a hard time, and I decided to show you that you couldn't push people around like that. So we had our first fight within five minutes of meeting each other. Your momma was upset, but I couldn't see letting you get away with it, even though you were just a baby. My daddy was in the military, too; he was hardly ever around, so my momma raised me and my brothers by herself, and...well, let's just say we could have used some male influence. Discipline.

You know, in officer training school we were taught how to turn boys into Marines. I never got any training in being the father of a kid who was smarter than me even as a baby, but I didn't think I'd need it. You were in your twenties before I began to suspect I might have been wrong about that.

Damn, you were smart. You could talk the hind leg off a mule, and had more questions than a dog has fleas. I used to get a stomachache when you'd start asking me things, because I thought a dad ought to know everything, and a lot of times I didn't know the answers, or the answers I thought were right didn't make sense to you—and you always let me know it. One time you were telling me something you'd learned from a doctor on one of your trips to the emergency room, repeating what the doctor had said word for word. I was trying to fix a loose wire in the stereo, not really sure what I was doing, and you started asking me about that. Finally I got fed up and gave you a quarter and said you could keep it if you'd stop talking for an hour. You took the coin and went away, but ten minutes later you were back.

"Here's your quarter," you said, handing it to me. "I want to talk."

What an idiot I was. "Son, can't you see I need some peace to figure out what's wrong here? Keep the quarter and go find Momma if you need to yakkity yak."

You gave me a long look, pocketed the quarter, and walked away. You weren't more than eight years old. You didn't bother me much after that, and by the time you were in your teens, you didn't talk to me at all unless you had to.

That was probably my fault. Momma thinks I was too hard on you. But I swear I didn't know how else to deal with you. Your lousy grades. The fights with your teachers. The dope. The beer. I grounded you, took away privileges, stopped your allowance, refused to take you for your learner's permit. You sneaked out anyway, sold pot to raise money, and drove without a permit. I didn't see how I could safely let up the pressure on you; I was scared of what you might do if I gave you room to breathe. And I never shut up about your shortcomings. How would you ever know what to fix if someone wasn't right there to tell you where you were going wrong?

Besides, I found that picking at your defects was the only way to get you to do what I wanted. You'd get mad and pull all As, or make the team, just to show me.

I didn't have anything to do with the way things turned out with that Stacy, so I thought you might want to talk about it, man to man, but you've never said a word about the break up. Momma and I were surprised to hear that she'd just been working here a few months ago. You never said anything about that, either, even though we saw you when she was here. Instead, you talked about your motorcycle.

I wish I could find a way to take back that quarter and get you to open up to me again. I wish I could go back to that day, put down the damned pliers, and say, "Okay, boy, sit down and tell me what's on your mind. Ask me anything you want—if I don't know the answer, we'll find it together." Then maybe today I could say the things I need to say to you before too much more time passes.

Things like: You are my boy, Greg. I love you so much it hurts. It hurts to see you looking so unhappy all the time. I don't understand it; I've flown combat, I've had friends lose both legs and joke about how they needed to drop some weight anyway. Why can't you just suck it up and move on? It hurts that you haven't had anyone in your life since that Stacy, or if you have, she's not the kind of girl you want us to know about.

Most of all, it hurts to think that you don't know how proud I am of you. You aren't the kid I dreamed of on that flight home from Germany, but the man you became is much, much better than anything I could have imagined. You're everything I could want in a son. And unless we both do a whole lot of changing, I don't know how I'll ever find a way to convince you of that.

-0-

Blythe House returned to find her husband in a characteristic pose: elbows on his knees, chin on his fists, staring into the far distance. She went to his side and laid an arm around his shoulders, and felt him slump a little against her hip.

Their son stirred and opened his eyes. They searched the room briefly before focusing on his parents. Then, as if the sight of them was too much to bear, he closed his eyes again and let himself drift away.


	12. Cameron

Cameron arrived for her shift pushing a cart loaded with flowers, gift baskets, and balloons, and began arranging them on the counter where House could presumably see them. Blythe House was delighted.

"I'd hoped you'd find a way to show them to him," she said. "He has opened his eyes, and I think he sees us."

Cameron beamed. "It seemed silly to keep all this color in his office, where no one can see it," she said modestly.

The Houses departed with directions to "a nice place for lunch, not too far away," and Cameron went back to her decorating project.

Chase came down the hall and ground to a halt in the doorway. "What's this, a wake?" he asked.

"How many funerals have you been to where they have Spongebob Squarepants balloons?" demanded Cameron.

Chase picked up House's chart and checked the monitors. "Temperature's normal," he told his boss. "I guess we don't need to draw any bloods after all. Too bad—I was looking forward to it. Maybe I'll take some anyway, just to piss you off."

"He can probably hear you, you know," said Cameron.

"I'm counting on it," Chase answered. He began to poke through the floral arrangements. "Some of these are new. You framed Ian's drawing? Wait, here's a new one. Crikey, who did this?"

It was an amateurish pencil portrait of House, probably drawn from the photo Cuddy had given the newspapers, but the artist had taken some liberties; House's beard was slightly fuller than he usually wore it, and his head appeared against a glowing background.

"Melinda Bardach drew it," said Cameron. Chase looked blank. "Tick Girl," she added, exasperated.

"Oh, yeah," said Chase. "Looks like she's got House right up there with Jesus—is that supposed to be a halo around his head?"

"I think it's supposed to be Aragorn," Cameron said. Another blank look from Chase. "Aragorn? The King? Lord of the Rings?"

"Same thing," said Chase. "What is it about House that inspires so much female hero worship?"

Cameron flushed. "Is that a shot at me?"

Chase was silent for a moment. "I'm not sure you always see him for what he really is," he said carefully.

"I know exactly what he is," she insisted, with some heat. "He's a crude, manipulative, intimacy-challenged son of a bitch. And he saves people's lives."

"And all he needs is the love of a good woman, and he'll throw off the drugs, the depression, and the lifelong habit of treating people—including you—like crap," Chase shot back.

"That's not what I—"

"That IS what you think." Chase leaned forward. "Look at you. Flowers. Balloons. Being sweet to his parents. You think he's going to come out of this a changed man. He'll see what's missing in his life and turn himself into the man you think he can be. And I'm telling you not to get your hopes up. People don't change that much. Even getting shot, spending a week in a coma, he's likely to wake up the same old bastard who gives you all his grunt work and ignores you when he's not playing with your head."

Cameron raised an eyebrow. "You've really put some thought into this."

Chase heaved a sigh. "It's not because of what happened between us. I know that was a one-time thing, I'm not looking for anything more. But I've been watching him jerk you around for over a year now, and I think I'm entitled to an opinion."

Cameron folded her arms and gazed at the carpet, looking obstinate.

"One thing definitely isn't going to change," Chase continued. "He resents you because you're pretty and popular and you make everything look easy. He's neither pretty nor popular, and he does everything the hard way. And unless you gain fifty pounds, grow stupid, and start making a lot of enemies, he's going to go on resenting you, whatever else happens between you."

"You think anything is going to happen between us?"

"Don't you want it to?"

"I don't know anymore," Cameron confessed. "I don't understand my feelings about anything, or why I do the things I do. Nothing makes sense. That time with you—I still don't know what that was about!"

"Maybe you just needed a roll in the hay. Everyone does, from time to time. It didn't have to mean anything."

"It did," Cameron said vehemently. "It had to. It's not like me—" She drew a breath and plunged ahead: "You are the second man I ever slept with."

If she had announced she was really a man, Chase could not have looked more thunderstruck. Cameron regarded him with bitter amusement.

"You don't have to look so stunned. I'm not very sexual, apparently."

"Oh, yes you are," Chase assured her. Cameron laughed, a little pleased, a little mocking. Chase was nettled. "Well, look at you! There must be guys who'd walk across hot coals for half a chance with you!"

Cameron regarded him speculatively, then said, "I was almost 20 years old before I kissed a boy."

"So…maybe you kissed a girl?" Chase ventured, carefully.

"Nope. Nothing like that. I was just a late bloomer, that's all." Cameron busied herself with the chart then, signing in, checking the IV lines. Chase understood that he was dismissed. He backed out of the room, a look of utter bafflement on his face.

-0-

I was an ugly teenager. By the time I was 14 I weighed almost 180 pounds. I had acne everywhere—on my face, my neck, my back, between my breasts. I had braces and coke-bottle glasses. My high school nicknames were the kind that scar a person for life: Hound Dog, Sweathog, Pizza Face. From age 11 to 18, I avoided mirrors. I hunched my shoulders so my hair hid my face and avoided eye contact, thinking if I didn't look at other people, they wouldn't be able to see me.

That's why I want to laugh every time you tell me how easy my life has been because I'm beautiful. You think I've floated from one bouquet to the next on the strength of smiles and fluttering eyelashes. You think I don't know what it's like to be rejected.

I had a couple of friends as goony as I was, and we kept each other's spirits up with long talks about the moral superiority of inner beauty and the shallowness of people who only valued shiny, perfect surfaces. We wrote poetry, shared favorite songs, filled diaries, and nourished each other's idealistic notions of love. We talked about the absolute necessity of always doing the right thing, no compromises, no exceptions—we hadn't had much experience with moral dilemmas ourselves, so we had a clear-eyed, totally objective view of right and wrong.

We cheered each other up with birthday cards and holiday presents. You wonder why I'm so sentimental, why I decorate the conference room for Christmas and pester you on your birthday. You wonder where I got my ideas about showing affection and caring. It was from those girls. They saved my life on days when even getting another A-plus in chemistry wasn't enough to make me want to keep going.

Things started to change in college. I replaced my glasses with contacts. My skin cleared. The braces came off, and so did the baby fat. Encouraged, I dieted and exercised to tone and shape my new body. Every lost pound brought a new wave of compliments. I got hooked on them; they became as important to me as getting the next A and keeping my GPA in the 4.0 range.

I could have adopted a whole new lifestyle to go with my new looks, but I didn't trust them to last. I loved the attention I was getting—for the first time, ever—from the boys in my classes, but I knew it would only take one acne breakout and 15 new pounds to scare them away again. Since that was always a possibility, I had to stay sharp enough to get by on good grades alone; I couldn't afford to slack off. So I stayed in on Friday nights, catching up with my assigned work and doing extra credit projects, and if I went out on a Saturday, I went with a group. I was terrified of being alone with a boy, afraid of losing control of all that pent-up emotion from my adolescent years, afraid it would shock and scare him. I wanted to see what sex was like, but I felt I'd fallen so far behind my peers, it was almost too late to begin.

I might still be a virgin if I hadn't struggled with organic chemistry. By midterms I was pulling a C, which threatened to drag down my GPA. I asked Charlie Cameron, a teaching assistant, for help outside of class, and he began to meet with me twice a week to go over the material. He was friendly and thoughtful, with a gentle sense of humor and a teaching style that made you feel mistakes were just part of the learning process, not an automatic sign of stupidity.

He also seemed attracted to me, but I couldn't be sure. At 24, he was less obvious about wanting to get into my pants than classmates my own age. This was reassuring and frustrating in equal parts; did it mean he respected me as a whole person, or was there something about me that turned him off? I examined myself in the mirror after every meeting, looking for the fatal defect.

I liked him. A lot. He must have guessed that I had a crush on him, and one day he took me for a long walk to explain that he couldn't be my boyfriend because, barring a miracle, he would be dead in six months.

He was so matter-of-fact about it that I had trouble believing him. How could anyone discuss impending death so calmly? He admitted that this was a difficult conversation for him, but said it was because he had come to love me, and it was the fact that he would not be able to explore these feelings further, not fear of death, that was breaking his heart.

At that moment, my crush turned to love. I also became determined to turn this tragedy around. I'd studied enough oncology to know that the prognosis for Charlie's form of cancer was bleak, but I had also read lots of stories about loved ones who pulled a patient back from the brink when all the professionals had lost hope. I came to believe that, armed with love and knowledge, I would do the same for Charlie.

I would start by providing him with the support and care he should have gotten from relatives. Both of Charlie's parents died of alcohol-related diseases when he was an undergraduate, and his brother and sister promptly vanished into the American heartland were never heard from again. There was no one to share his sadness over his failing health, no one to advocate for him with the medical community, no one to hold his hand at night when there was nothing to think about except what was about to happen. I decided to be that person.

To be really effective, I would need to elevate my legal status from friend to wife. I had a hard time convincing Charlie to go along with this. He was ready to believe that I loved him, but he hated the idea of my tying myself to a dying man. Getting him to change his mind forced me to fall back on the oldest trick in the book: I seduced him, while letting him think he had somehow taken advantage of a naïve virgin. I made myself cry immediately afterwards, and he proposed before I'd soaked a second Kleenex.

The sex itself was…unremarkable. Maybe most first times are a letdown. I'd read so many romance novels in which the heroine loses her virginity in a kind of passionate dream, that the act itself was probably bound to be disappointing. Instead of an ecstatic out-of-body experience in which our two souls merged, there were embarrassing sounds and smells and considerable physical discomfort. I pretended to have a life-threatening orgasm, but Charlie wasn't fooled for a moment. "It will get better, Allison," he promised, stroking my hair.

It did get a little better. We didn't have much time to improve; within a few months Charlie was too sick to do more than hold me in bed, and a few weeks after that he began the series of hospitalizations that led, inexorably, to the night the oncologist started talking about palliative care. From there it was a short slide to the end.

I held up Charlie through all this. Joe held up me. I was 21 years old. I didn't really believe in death back then—at least, not for people my age. And here it was, staring back at me every time I looked at Charlie. Joe was there when the fear made it hard to breathe. Like a plant following the sun, I found myself turning away from the sickness and death represented by my poor husband and towards Joe, who represented strength, health, and life. I fell in love again.

I think he loved me, too. At least, there was an unspoken offer of physical comfort in his attentions to me. I told Wilson the truth, though: I couldn't have lived with myself if I had gone to bed with Joe. Definitely not if it happened while Charlie was alive. And afterwards—after he was no longer alive to be hurt by anything I did—it seemed wrong to experience pleasure with another man when there had been so little opportunity to find it with Charlie. It wasn't fair.

That sense of unfairness stuck with me for the next ten years. I had no interest in the slick charmers who put the moves on me at school. It seemed to me that the best tribute I could pay to Charlie was to do well in medical school, and I applied myself to my studies with grim purpose. When I finally had an emotional meltdown, my counselor suggested that my endless studying was a strategy for shutting out the world, and an attempt to relieve my guilt over Joe by making a martyr of myself in Charlie's name. I stopped going to counseling after that visit. I applied for a fellowship in the Diagnostics Department at Princeton Plainsboro Teaching Hospital because I had heard that only took the top candidates would even get an interview, and I was determined to make the cut.

I don't remember much about the interview. I was surprised at the shabbiness of your clothes, and a little insulted by your absentmindedness. You looked up from my resume once to take me in from head to toe, but your expression was disgruntled, not admiring. I was amazed, months later, when you told me you hired me for my looks. I hadn't thought you'd noticed.

Then you invited me to that stupid truck thing. I agreed, but I wasn't really looking forward to it. I don't think you'd ever even smiled at me at that point; most of the time you seemed to find me flaky, ineffectual, sentimental, possibly a little dim. I expected it to be a long evening full of uncomfortable silences and the occasional putdown. The last thing I expected was to have fun.

You had fun, too—admit it.

Now that I think about it, it was the first time I'd ever been out with a man that wasn't overshadowed by sadness or didn't feel forced on me by well-meaning friends who fixed me up so I wouldn't spend the whole weekend in the library. It was a little awkward at first, but once the show got started you lit up, yelling amazingly obscene things at the drivers, making jokes that were funny instead of cynical, laughing in such a genuinely happy way that I laughed, too. You teased me and stole my cotton candy. I felt I had brought something out in you that was good and healthy—for both of us. And by the time you dropped me off, I was halfway in love with you.

Things immediately got weird. I went to work the next morning expecting some sign that things had changed for you, too. If they had, you hid it pretty well. You were as gruff and irritable with me as before.

I couldn't believe it. I also didn't have the faintest idea what to do about it. I spent the years when pretty girls learn how to navigate romance as a pariah, hiding in my room. I didn't know how to approach you or what to say when I did. I cringe when I think of how I must have looked to you at times—needy, desperate, clingy, a chick who doesn't know how to take "no comment" for an answer. Quitting a prestigious fellowship because it seemed like the noble thing to do, then realizing it might be interpreted as the adolescent sulking of a woman scorned. Which to some extent it was.

My attempts to vamp you were even worse. It's hard to explain what it's like to go through seven formative years as a homely bookworm and then suddenly realize that others find you attractive, desirable. Here's a metaphor you might appreciate: it was like being put on a great big Harley Davidson after never riding anything but a scooter. I knew I had a lot more power now, but I had no idea how much or what would happen if I tried to use it.

I got a hell of a buzz when you came to my apartment—twice!—to ask me to come back, and an even bigger rush when you agreed to a "real" date. I was drunk on my power, making flippant comments to Foreman and Chase, acting as if I had you in the bag. I really thought I did, too. I remember getting ready; gazing into the mirror, astonished at my own beauty, thinking there was no way you would be able to resist me. But you did.

Here's how I have always wanted to respond to what you said to me that night:

As usual, you were partly right. I do tend to mix compassion with passion—I seem wired to get emotionally entangled with people I want to help. I'm beginning to see the wisdom behind your campaign to roughen me a little: I can't go on attaching myself to every patient or I'll burn out and be no good to anyone by the time I'm forty.

As usual, though, you also were partly wrong. You talked about yourself as if you couldn't see anything there to love. I admit your endearing qualities are harder to see some days than others. There are lots of less appealing layers overlapping them. But you also are funny and smart and surprisingly thoughtful at times, and you have an inner compass that keeps you on course even when it appears that you are flying blind. That's what attracts me to you the most. I want to help you see and value that part of yourself. Maybe that won't happen the way I had hoped—as your lover. If you'll let me, though, I'd still like to try as your friend.


	13. Chase

Chase returned a little late for his shift, the wrinkles on his cheek and the odd bend in his hair indicating that he'd taken another nap on one of those miserable cots in the residents' lounge. He grunted a greeting to Cameron and went to look at the patient. After a moment, he motioned her to his side.

"Have you noticed?" He nodded towards House. "It's already working."

Cameron followed his eyes. "What's working?"

"The coma. It's working," said Chase. "Look at his face."

Cameron looked harder. There was something different there, but she couldn't identify its exact nature. House just looked smoother, somehow.

"The tension has gone out of his face," Chase explained. "He's not in pain. He looks ten years younger, doesn't he?"

But Cameron was looking at her colleague. "You really seem invested in this experiment," she remarked.

Chase tried for an offhand laugh. "In the med school I went to, they told us first of all to try not to kill anyone, and second, to make sick people well again if we could pull it off. Of course, I don't know what they teach you here in the States."

"Come on, Chase. You know what I'm talking about. Half the time you walk around here like a tourist who got on the wrong bus. Now you're Super Doc, hardly sleeping, hardly eating, in here at all hours like a mother hen. What's going on? Does House have a hit on your grandma if you don't pull this off for him?"

Chase gave another short laugh and shook his head. He pretended to be busy with the chart.

"You like him, don't you?" Cameron leaned in toward Chase, trying to make eye contact. "Tell the truth. He picks on you, says cruel things, gives you all the shit jobs, and you still like him. He treats you even worse than me, and you're knocking yourself out trying to make him well again."

The Aussie shook his head. "I can't explain to myself why I put up with his crap," he said. "For sure I can't explain it to you."

-0-

God, you look old. Old enough to be my father. You aren't my father, though. You often remind me of that. You started the day I came here for my interview. You wanted to make sure you went on record about our relationship right from the start.

"You got this interview because your dad called and asked me to give you one," you said flatly. "Just so you know: I'm not your dad's friend. I'm not your friend. I'm definitely not your dad. If I decide to ignore my immediate impression, I'll be your boss. In some ways that's worse. In some ways it's better. Your turn." You leaned forward like you'd just declared checkmate, and waited.

You didn't throw me, though. I'd been a target for bullies all my life, and I knew the game was over if I lost my temper.

"I've already got a father," I shrugged. "I've got lots of friends. What I need right now is a boss."

"You don't have much of a father," you countered. "He sounded like he was describing someone else's kid. I had to keep asking, 'This is your son we're talking about, right?' Come to think of it, he didn't really answer the question. 'Robert is a good boy, very bright, perhaps a bit unmotivated.' He seemed to think I might be able to supply you with motivation. Your mother's dead, right? Alcohol-related cirrhosis? He left her when you were just a lad. That must've sucked."

I'd had plenty of practice keeping cool under fire, but I'd never been so expertly needled in all my life. "What's this got to do with the fellowship?" I blurted.

You sat back, gratified. "Nothing whatsoever," you admitted cheerfully. "I'm just nosy. It says on your resume you spent a year studying to be a priest. You really believe in all that bullshit?"

We were still walking on ice here, but at least it was thicker ice. After thirteen years of parochial school and the year at St. Joseph's, defending my faith came pretty easily. "I'm not sure of much anymore," I said coolly, "but I am sure it's not all bullshit."

You laughed then. "Well, may your god help you if you get this fellowship," you said, shaking your head and writing something in my file. "I'd ride you worse than any ruler-wielding, mind-warping, sexually frustrated nun who ever wore a wimple. You'll hear up or down in about a week."

Why do non-Catholics assume all Catholic teachers are sadists? I've run across a few of those, but listening to friends who attended public schools, I get the impression that the type is just as common outside the Church. Most of my teachers were good-hearted people, strict but kind, and if they occasionally went a bit overboard with the warnings about sin and limbo and Hell, the intent was more along the lines of Scared Straight than terror for the sake of terror.

They were just as quick with praise. "Oh, well done, Robert! The Blessed Mother would be very pleased!" my catechism teacher would cry, and I'd feel like I'd just been hugged by my own mum. Actually, Mum didn't do a lot of hugging unless she was in her cups, and then it was usually accompanied by tears. But between my teachers' descriptions of the joy the Virgin felt when I applied myself and my mother's soggy embraces, I got the idea.

I loved school. I always had lots of friends who also handed in their homework on time and got gold stars next to their names for extra credit reading. Sitting in a quiet classroom with my friends, doing lessons that came easily to me, for the warm praise of nuns and priests who made me feel wanted and noticed and valued, was all I ever asked for by way of heaven.

Home suffered a little by comparison. Let's not mince words: my parents didn't really want to be parents. It's not that they didn't like me, or wished I'd never been born; it's just that they seemed to feel that it would have been better all around if I'd managed to be someone else's child.

"The only birth control sanctioned by Rome is the rhythm method," you once observed, "which is a great way of building membership. Everyone knows Catholics are a little off-beat."

My parents wouldn't have found that very funny. They were both in their mid-thirties, both building their reputations as medical researchers, when Mum discovered she was pregnant. This being the 1970s, I suppose most American couples in their predicament would have either had an abortion or made a formal pact to share parenting duties equally. But my parents were too Catholic to consider taking a life for the sake of convenience, and too Old-Europe to entertain the idea of my dad changing diapers. All the responsibility for my care went to Mum who, by dropping out of the world of conferences and teaching engagements, quickly lost touch with her specialty, and eventually with medicine in general. She never came right out and said that I cost her her professional identity and forced her to turn to gin for consolation. But I got the message.

I also got the message that my existence mustn't inconvenience my father in any way. Now that he was doing all the intellectual heavy lifting in the family, it was vitally important that he be free at all times to devote himself to his work. School plays, football matches and the like were an unprofitable use of time and therefore out of the question. Again, this was never said in so many words. But I understood the equation quite well by the time I was seven or eight.

Mum came to all my school events in those early years. But as time went on, she was more and more likely to arrive drunk, usually showing up late and causing a scene, and by the time I was ten I had stopped telling her about my activities in advance.

The only time I could count on Mum to be sober and Dad to show up was Mass, and I made it my life's work to be an active participant, first in the children's choir, then in the Christmas pageant, then as an altar boy. Each time I performed one of these parts under my parents' proud, approving gaze, I felt we were all being brought into communion with Jesus and the Blessed Mother—I felt we really were a family. In the drama of the Mass, amid the incense, bells, and ancient Latin incantations, I felt the presence of Love.

Since the nuns and priests tended to award Mass duties on the basis of obedience rather than talent, I was always chosen. Being outwardly good was easy for me; I'd had a lifetime of practice at home, trying to atone for being born and therefore such a nuisance to my parents.

Inwardly, it was a different story. Inside I often sulked, felt resentful, even mentally used words and thought thoughts I knew were going to earn me a place in Hell. I could fool my teachers and maybe even my Dad with outward appearances, but I knew God saw and only really cared about what was inside, and inside I was a foul, nasty little boy.

By fifteen I had acquired enough adolescent skepticism to question whether my parents' divorce and Mum's subsequent descent into full-blown alcoholism and death was God's punishment for my inner vileness, but some part of me still clung to the idea that I could make it all right in the end if I tried to be as good on the inside as I was on the outside. That, and the feelings the Mass could still arouse in me, and the beaming approbation of my teachers and even my dad when they heard of my plans, convinced me that I should become a priest. Even then my commitment was tentative at best—I didn't really think I had a vocation, just an inclination born of fear. Even before I got to the seminary I wondered if I might be doing myself more harm than good by becoming a priest under false pretenses.

For one thing, how could I take a vow of poverty when I always had my dad's money to fall back on? I was a trust fund kid. I couldn't possibly know what it was like to be really poor.

For another, I wasn't at all certain I could manage celibacy. I'd always had female admirers, from the days on the playground when they would chase and kiss me to the occasional teenage "mixer" where various girls would allow me various liberties, from French kissing to hands over the blouse to hands under the skirt. I'd managed to emerge from all this with my virtue technically intact, but only just, and I'd have been lying if I'd told anyone that I didn't dream of ditching the wretched thing altogether. My fantasy was to be caught unaware—asleep, maybe—by a girl who knew what she was doing. She would relieve me of the burden of sin and the strain of lust by taking advantage of my temporary helplessness. I would be laid, but it would not be my fault.

I was still working all this out when I entered the seminary. Is it odd to admit that a part of me loved the place? The security of ritual and routine, the pleasures of academic discovery, the cool stone walls and well-tended gardens, suited me perfectly. Even the problem of lust was less troublesome, once girls became rare visitors instead of everyday provocations.

There was one snag in the smooth fabric of my new life, and that was Father Bill O'Donnell, an Irishman and a Jesuit who taught Church history. He was short and dark and had brown eyes instead of blue, but there was the same mad-monk gleam in them when he turned them on me. Like you, Father Bill never gave his students a moment's peace; he seemed to sense when your mind started to wander, and that's when he would pounce.

"Robert, tell us the grounds upon which the Church leveled the charge of heresy against Galileo Galilei."

"That he advanced the concept of heliocentrism in direct opposition to Scripture, which describes the Earth as the center of the universe."

"And Galileo's defense?"

"Was based on St. Augustine's position that Scripture is not intended to be taken literally."

"And what is your opinion of Galileo's defense and subsequent agreement to stop teaching heliocentrism?"

"He had to accommodate himself to the prejudices of the time he lived in."

"Now, I'm surprised to hear a young scientist like yourself take that view! So a truth may be set aside in the interests of accommodation?"

"What I mean to say is—"

"Ah, what ye meant to say! And what ye said before was just so we could enjoy the sound of yer voice?"

I was used to gauging a teacher's prejudices and tailoring my answers accordingly, but—again, like you—Father Bill proved almost impossible to read and even harder to keep up with. His specialty was taking your answer, twisting it, and thrusting it back at you, always keeping you off balance; and yet I was always a little disappointed when he'd finally turn his attention to someone else.

He didn't seem to have a very high opinion of me, so I was surprised when he began to include me in the group of older seminarians who joined him for dinner in his apartment once a week. The others were the top students and fully in step with his debating style. I was usually too overwhelmed to contribute much, and once in awhile, in my nervousness, I would drink too much wine and have to spend the night in Father Bill's living room.

There were usually one or two other men in the same condition, and since they were all older than me, they would take the sofas and I would roll up in an afghan on the floor. One night, though, I reeled back into the living room after a trip to the loo to find I was the only one left. Father Bill threw me a pillow and a blanket and bid me goodnight. I collapsed on the better sofa and instantly fell asleep.

I dreamt I was in a classroom, drowsing in my chair. A shadowy figure entered the room and approached me. I knew without seeing her that it was a girl. She positioned herself between my legs and began to kiss me. I recognized the scene: it was my fantasy of helpless sex, although I'd never actually dreamed about it before. I was going to let things take their natural course when I remembered where I was. I was not going to have a wet dream on Father Bill's couch.

I struggled to the surface of consciousness to find a face looming above me. From the light of the street lamp outside, I saw that it was Father Bill, and I realized that he had been kissing me. I was paralyzed with shock and fear; I could think of a dozen ways to respond, but the only one that seemed remotely feasible was to go back to sleep.

I closed my eyes again and willed myself unconscious, even as I felt Father Bill's lips moving down my body.

I was asleep. I couldn't help it if he found what he was looking for. I wasn't responsible for what happened next. If I actually found some pleasure in the act, it wasn't my fault.

Eventually he rose and left. I lay on the sofa, wide awake now, and considered what to do next. I briefly entertained thoughts of killing Father Bill, but I realized that my real rage was with the Church I was about to commit my life to, for failing to protect me. "Lead us not into temptation." I'd been properly led, and no one had said a word of warning.

I grind my teeth whenever Cameron starts going on about trust. I had put my full faith and trust in the Roman church, and that trust had been violated so thoroughly that I doubted I would ever be the same. There could be no question of becoming a priest now; I couldn't even bear the thought of attending Mass, let alone lead one.

I gathered my things and crept out of the apartment. The next morning I formally withdrew from the seminary. Then I called my father and informed him of my decision. Of course I didn't say why. I told him that he and my stepmom would have to let me live with them while I applied to college.

There was a long silence at his end. "What do you plan to do with your life now, Robert?" he asked.

I had already thought of the answer: I would go into medicine, a decision made more out of a lack of imagination than any desire to be a healer. Dad sighed.

"Of course I am pleased to hear that you have given the matter some thought, but I must warn you that a medical career is not something to enter into lightly. Certainly it will require more perseverance than you are demonstrating right now."

With parenting like that, how could I fail?

I didn't tell Dad, but the other decision I made that night was to devote myself to the female sex. I wouldn't be a total hound, but I wouldn't turn down any attractive opportunity, either. Fortunately, I had lots of opportunities during the six months I stayed with Dad. Unfortunately, coming right on top of leaving the priesthood, my whoring around drove the final wedge between us. We had a bloody fight the night before I left for college, both of us saying unforgivable things, and we never spent more than a few hours together or exchanged more than a few words after that. I suppose I always thought we'd find a way to mend our differences someday, but of course that's out of the question now.

All this is a very long way of saying that my ideas about relationships with older men are fully as fucked up as Cameron's. I have no idea why I stay on this job or what I really want from you. Obviously, you're not much of a father figure. Is that what I wanted from you, anyway? Or do I need you to be my friend? My hero? My mentor?

My lover?

Christ, don't let it be that!

I guess I'll just go on taking crap from you until I figure it out.


	14. Dazed and Confused

The afternoon of the second day brought an unauthorized visitor: Nurse Brenda, just off clinic duty. She strode into the room as if taking possession of it and the patient, walking right past Cameron and Chase without looking at them and going straight to the bed.

" So ließen sie dich es versuchen. Gut für dich (So they let you try it. Good for you)," she said, her tone half accusation, half approval. Then, in English, "Isn't anyone here taking care of you?"

The two young doctors exchanged a look.

"We're sitting right here," Chase reminded her politely.

"I can see that," Brenda said dryly. "Meanwhile, your patient's been sweating into the same sheets for at least three days, and I bet it didn't occur to either of you to clean him up any."

Cameron opened her mouth and closed it. The idea of giving House a sponge bath had not only not occurred to her, she wished it hadn't been brought up at all. A peculiar feeling of embarrassment over his sudden powerlessness had constrained her from dealing with any aspect of him except his head and arms; even during the hours she had been alone with him, she looked at anything under the sheet, and had no plans to do so—at least, not in this context.

Chase just assumed the deer-in-the-headlights look he always fell back on when challenged by a stronger personality.

"Of course not. Doctors," Brenda muttered. "You're all about the disease, can't be bothered with the host. Especially you," she told House. "It takes a nurse to think about the boring stuff. Clear out of here, both of you, I'm going to give him a sponge bath. You can come back in a few minutes and help me change the sheets."

Recognizing defeat, the doctors retired the field. Nurse Brenda rolled up her sleeves and went briskly to work.

" Ich weiß, daß du eher Keira Knightley tust dies für dich haben würdest," she told House sternly, "Du mußt für mich vereinbaren."

("I know you'd rather have Keira Knightley do this for you, but you'll just have to settle for me.")

By the third day the doctors began to think they might actually get through the rest of the treatment without medical crises or detection by the authorities. They were also growing giddy with exhaustion and showed a marked inclination towards horseplay. The Clap found its way out of the desk drawer where Cameron had hidden it ("We don't want to have to explain this to Mrs. House") and into House's bed, where it alternately snuggled next to his cheek or crept down between his feet for a nap. Sometimes it emerged briefly for a game—automatically dubbed Catch the Clap—between the patient's male attendants. Gift basket goodies were carefully unwrapped, consumed, and the packages meticulously reassembled with various objects (a cafeteria meatball, an assortment of paper clips, a couple of "joints" consisting of tissue paper stuffed with dead leaves from one of the get well plants) inside.

Some evildoer on the staff had started a list on the conference room whiteboard:

101 Uses for a Comatose Boss

Suggestions ranged from the pedestrian (doorstop, paperweight, passenger for HOV lane) and the snide ("How can you tell when he's comatose?") to the fanciful (incubator for orphaned Canada goose eggs) and the mildly perverted (manikin for S&M boutique—this last in handwriting that looked suspiciously like that of the Dean of Medicine). When that side of the board was filled, someone started a new list on the flip side:

While You Were Out

"The Nobel Committee called: Can they have your recipe for frozen margaritas?"

Otherwise, the team tended to avoid the conference room, preferring to hang out in the ICU with whoever was on duty at the time. If it was House's parents, there was a good chance of hearing some story from his misspent youth that could be used against him later.

"Greg was always so good at chemistry," Blythe House would begin.

"He knew enough to figure out how to make bootleg whiskey, anyway," grumbled John.

"I'd forgotten about that," Blythe said, a faraway look in her eyes. The team exchanged a look and leaned forward in an encouraging way. Blythe laughed softly and shook her head. "He built a still in the woods behind our house when he was in seventh grade," she explained. "One of the neighbor boys helped him."

"He always managed to recruit a buddy who was long on brawn and short on brains to help him with his schemes, no matter where we were," her husband footnoted.

"We never would have known if he and the boy hadn't tried to steal two five-pound bags of sugar from the boy's mother's pantry," Blythe sighed. "They almost got away with it, but she noticed that they looked lumpy and patted them down before they got out the door."

"He could have blown up half the block with that still," John observed. "He did almost blow up his desk once, remember?"

"I wasn't home at the time," Blythe said evasively.

"He found a shotgun shell in the woods, spilled the gunpowder out on his desk blotter, and lit it with a match," House, Sr. recalled. "I was taking a nap. There was a hell of an explosion. I almost crapped. I ran up the stairs expecting to find a smoldering corpse, but he was just sitting there, looking scared but curious. 'I thought it would fizzle,' he said. 'It must've been more compressed than it looked.' He was about ten."

"Sounds like he was a handful," said Foreman, in a tell-me-more kind of way.

John House lowered his head and pointed. "See these grey hairs? They started when he was two and managed to get out of his crib, past all the barricades we'd put up by the window, and out onto the roof."

"That was a bad moment," murmured Blythe.

"We were in the yard raking leaves, and we heard him gabbling above our heads. I've never been so scared in my life."

"I never saw you run so fast," smiled Blythe, and touched his hand.

"I don't think my feet even touched the stairs on the way up."

"He has a way of keeping you on your toes," agreed Cuddy. The Houses looked at her quizzically and she pointed to her own hair. "See this? Industrial strength guaranteed-to-cover-the-grey hair dye, a hundred bucks a month for touch-ups. I started going right after his first week on the job, when he told a congressman he could go on pretending he got venereal warts from a toilet seat, but the location suggested an encounter with the restroom attendant." Too late, Cuddy remembered that her audience included the subject's elderly parents. "I'm sorry for sounding so crude," she said, genuinely embarrassed.

Blythe brushed the apology aside. "That certainly sounds like Greg," she said, gazing sadly at her son. "I tried so hard to teach him tact and manners, and he would try for a little while, but then something would happen that he'd feel compelled to comment on. His first grade teacher told us that she tried to find out why he seemed so unhappy in her class. 'Is it the lessons?' she asked. 'Unh unh,' said Greg. 'Is it the other children?' 'Uhn uhn.' 'Is it the teacher?' 'Uh huh.'"

"I don't know where he got that attitude from," said John. Cameron looked at him for a long moment, but said nothing.

-0-

Cuddy left House's room after her shift on the fourth day to find Chase at the nurses' station, smoothly deflecting questions about what exactly was going on in there. She stood out of sight, listening, and when Chase finally escaped to House's room, Cuddy followed him.

"I want to tell you how much I appreciate your help in this adventure," she said.

Chase shrugged, but he looked pleased. "I'm just doing my job."

"I'd say this is a little above and beyond your job description," Cuddy observed. "You've taken responsibility not just for his life, but all of our careers. And you've handled it beautifully."

"Be careful about saying I did a good job in front of him," Chase joked, nodding at House. "If he heard that, the shock could kill him."

Cuddy regarded him steadily for a moment. "I don't think he'd be the least bit surprised," she said. "He picked you for a reason."

"Yeah, it's one more thing to bust my balls over."

"No," Cuddy said firmly, "because he knew you could deliver. He told me once that if you ever get the bird dogging out of your system, you're going to run this place someday."

Chase was studying the chart as if it contained the key to a code that would disclose Scarlett Johanssen's phone number. But he looked gratified.

-0-

"Why don't you ever talk to him?" Foreman asked Cameron.

"I feel silly. What do I say: 'How're the hallucinations today, Boss?' Anyway, he told me once that my voice was grating."

"He had a migraine at the time. All voices are grating to someone with a migraine."

So Cameron tried to talk to her unresponsive boss, tentatively at first, then with more confidence. She started with a review of the day's clinic cases, moved on to hospital gossip, and sidetracked into a description of a dining set she was considering if it wasn't sold before the sale price dropped to where she could afford it. Gaining confidence, she launched into a detailed account of the fight she was having with the landlord over her desire to have her dining-sitting room painted something other than white.

"I told him I'd pay for a custom color, but he kept muttering about having to rent the place again after I leave. I honestly don't see the problem. Coral isn't that extreme a color. It might even be a selling point. It would look so nice with my couch now that I've gotten those slipcovers, and I've seen a tablecloth that would go with it, too, if I decide to get the table..."

Foreman re-entered the room in time to hear this, and glanced at the patient. For the first time since Chase had noted a change in his expression, House appeared to be in pain. "You might want to take a break," he suggested.

-0-

Foreman arrived for his shift later that night to find Wilson in a pensive mood. He glanced at the oncologist's face and busied himself setting his reading material and snacks out. After a moment, Wilson broke his silence.

"Am I Milhouse to House's Bart Simpson?" he asked.

"Say what?"

"Milhouse. You know, the dopey kid with the glasses. The Simpsons?"

"Oh! Yeah. I mean, no. What made you think that?"

"What his mom was saying today about House always having a sidekick. It got me thinking—do I have any life of my own, or do I spend too much of it watching his?"

Foreman grimaced. "You don't really think that. You're just depressed about the divorce. Everything looks bad at a time like that."

Wilson brooded over this. "My wife hated him," he remarked. "I mean, my wives. The last two, anyway. Bonnie didn't know him. But Vivian and Julie both accused me of spending more time with him than with them."

"Was it true?"

"Toward the end of the marriages, yeah."

"I wouldn't worry about it," Foreman decided. "If this works, he's gonna be a much more mobile dude anyway. He might come out of his shell, make some other friends. Who knows, he might even find a woman who isn't already married. You won't have to spend so much time worrying about him."

"There is that," Wilson said, but he looked uncomforted by the thought.

-0-

Cuddy reported for duty the next morning in time to catch Foreman working his flash cards. "How's that going?" she asked.

Foreman had tried to hide what he was doing, but decided the jig was up. "Not bad. I'm getting four out of five, and the fifth one is usually something pretty obscure—nothing I might have to deal with on a normal day here."

"We have normal days?"

"What passes for normal, then," Foreman amended. He began gathering his things. Cuddy drew a deep breath.

"Foreman. I'm sorry for what happened when you were so sick. If I'd let House biopsy the cop, you wouldn't be sitting here with your life's work on flash cards."

Foreman stood silent, listening.

"I've been over it in my mind a thousand times, and given the circumstances I still don't see how I could have legally or ethically done anything else, but—that's no consolation to you. I'm sorry I didn't have the nerve to do for you what you and the team are doing for House."

Still no comment from Foreman.

"You know he stood in the hallway outside the morgue for five hours, waiting for the guard to take a pee break so he could sneak in and grab a sample?"

"Legally and ethically, shouldn't you have stopped him? What if he had succeeded?"

Cuddy smiled ruefully. "I was hoping he would. And I'd have played dumb. I'm not like him, Foreman. I don't have that kind of nerve."

The neurologist unbent a little. "Don't sell yourself short," he told her. "House always says you have more balls than all the male doctors in this hospital put together."

"Excluding himself?"

"Doesn't that go without saying?"

"Of course." Cuddy sank into a chair, a little mollified. "Go get some sleep, Dr. Foreman. Four days down, one to go."


	15. The Awakening

Chase insisted that the doctors continue sitting with House for the first twelve hours after he was revived.

"The ICU staff can take over once he's awake," Foreman argued. Guardian of the night hours, he suffered more than any of them from the lack of sleep.

"We don't know how he'll react when he wakes up," said Chase. "If he becomes agitated, or has hallucinations, I'd rather the ICU staff not see it. The less they can infer about what we've been doing in here, the better. I'll take the overnight if you want."

Foreman looked at his colleague. Chase was gaunt and hollow-eyed from lack of sleep and regular meals, but he also looked firmer and more sure of himself than Foreman had ever seen him. He relented.

"I'll do one more night," he said. Then, directing his remark to his boss, he added, "But I want comp time."

-0-

Chase also enforced the men-only rule when it came to deciding who would be in the room for the emergence procedure. "The room is small to begin with," he said, "and if he starts thrashing around, we'll need all the weight we can get to keep him in the bed. He's been out of commission for less than a week—he can still do some damage."

"That's not why he didn't want us in there," said Cameron.

"All right, he didn't want to risk acting crazy in front of the ladies. Okay? Can you give him that?"

Cameron adopted a hands-off pose. "Sure. Fine. Jawohl, Herr Doctor." She and Cuddy departed, their shoulders a little stiff.

"It must really suck to have two beautiful women vying to take care of you," mused Wilson, watching them go.

Chase took a deep breath. "Right. Let's take him off the ventilator."

No one moved.

Foreman laughed. "I know we're not scared to find out what kind of a psychopath he'll be after five days of ketamine, so what's the hold up, doctors?" He leaned over the bed and began gently prying the tape off the week-old growth on House's chin and upper lip. Then, as if extracting the bottom plate from a stack of fine china, Foreman withdrew the tube from his boss's throat.

Chase disabled the microdrip. There was nothing to do now but wait.

Minutes passed.

"Maybe we should wave a cup of coffee under his nose," said Foreman.

Chase laughed. "Or a cold Reuben sandwich. I think the cafeteria's still open."

"I think we'd get better results with a double shot of single-malt scotch," Wilson opined.

House's eyelashes fluttered. The men fell silent again. They clustered around the head of the bed, watching.

More fluttering; then one eye opened, then the other. They closed tightly, then snapped open again to fix a look of horror on a spot just over Chase's shoulder. Wilson followed his gaze. The Spongebob Squarepants balloon had come loose from its moorings and, helium depleted, was floating level with the intensivist's head.

"He's hallucinating," said Wilson. "Someone get rid of that thing."

"Not...hallucinating. Ugly...goddamned thing. Hate...Squarepants." The volume was low as a whisper and the timbre rusty, but five days' rest had apparently undone some of the damage caused by the surgery to remove the bullet.

"He's got his voice back," said Chase, with truly mixed feelings. House rolled his eyes towards Chase and lifted an eyebrow. "The coma's over," Chase said loudly. "How do you feel?"

"Hit by a truck," House aspirated. "Too many...bats...in here. Birds. And the phonebooth."

"Okay, he is hallucinating," Foreman said cautiously. House closed his eyes wearily.

"Just get rid of them," he commanded peevishly, and drifted back into unconsciousness.

The men waited, but there seemed to be no further message.

"Well, that was worth missing dinner for," said Chase. "What a pity the womenfolk weren't here to see it. He seems to be in reasonably good shape—I'm going home. Page me if you need me."

-0-

The hours that followed were not quite as amusing.

Although a condition called shell shock (World War I) and combat fatigue (World War II) was well known to the twentieth-century military establishment, the first systematic investigations of what has come to be called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) only began with the return of badly-shaken veterans from the conflict in Viet Nam. Among their shared symptoms were repetitive, terrifying dreams and "flashbacks" in which they vividly relived their most horrific experiences. The studies expanded to include similarly afflicted veterans of Dust Storm and will no doubt continue as U.S. troops return from the current war in Iraq. The scientific and medical community, having evidently concluded that prevention is not in the cards, has focused their attention instead on the symptoms in hopes of finding ways to alleviate them. Their research into dreams and flashbacks indicates links between PTSD and a complex interaction between several chemicals and brain areas.

One of the chemicals involved is norepinephrine, which is part of the internal stress response and also may strengthen emotional memory. One study shows that compared with healthy men, men with PTSD have increased concentrations of this chemical in the cerebrospinal fluid that bathes the brain. The excess norepinephrine may create excess fear and anxiety, as well as abnormal memory formation and flashbacks.

The memory and emotional symptoms of PTSD are thought to be produced by a variety of brain structures, including the amygdala and hippocampus, which share connections and normally help maintain healthy formation of memories and emotions like fear. Brain scans show the amygdala of patients with PTSD produces an exaggerated response to sounds or sights reminiscent of the traumatic time that launched the PTSD.

There is also evidence that the hippocampus is smaller and probably impaired in those with PTSD. This is significant because the hippocampus is dedicated to "episode" memory in humans: the unique binding of places, persons, things, actions, and time. According to the neurocognitive theory of dreaming, the brain activates itself in REM sleep, erupting in waves of spontaneous neural discharge to the cerebral cortex which, lacking "real world" cues, cannot readily distinguish between what is real and what is not. The hippocampus begins to receive mixed neural messages that it processes as best it can. The result is the surreal but usually benign world most people experience at night, where a pile of broccoli represents your lost wristwatch and a Buddha-like figure stands in for your division's vice president.

In PTSD patients, however, the hippocampus begins forging connections between the neural messages and remembered horrors. Thus a combat veteran might begin to experience flashbacks of the battlefield after a series of fights—or "battles"—with a spouse. And thus a man who was shot by a stranger on an otherwise ordinary day at the office might, having glimpsed an unfamiliar "face" among his colleagues, might begin dreaming that the stranger had returned to finish the job.

It would be premature to diagnose House with PTSD. All that can be said conclusively is that he reanimated with a start at around ten p.m., kicking away the bed coverings and cursing hoarsely. When Wilson came forward to restrain him, House fought valiantly and succeeded in landing a blow to his right eye. Fortunately, Wilson had wrestled some in high school and college. Although House was taller and heavier, he was playing hurt and eventually succumbed to a shaky half nelson, giving Wilson enough riding time to grab a syringe preloaded with lorazepam from the drawer in the bedside table and inject it into the IV line. It took a little longer for House to feel the effects than Wilson would have liked, during which time the patient almost managed a reversal and possible "elopement," the preferred mental health industry term for "loony on the loose" (House's term of preference). When he finally relaxed and drifted away again, Wilson sat for a moment catching his breath. Then he paged Chase.

"Turns out you were right to put some Ativan where it was handy," he said, when Chase called.

"You didn't give it to him, did you?"

Wilson was momentarily speechless. "Yeah, I gave it to him. He was trying to leave the room with me hanging on like a backpack, and he almost made it. I had to give it to him."

"I was hoping to avoid further sedating him," Chase brooded.

"Then you come on in here and avoid sedating him. Bring a two-by-four just in case."

A pause. "All right. I'll be there in half an hour."

Wilson was slightly ashamed. "No, stay put. He's out cold now and will be for another four hours. Then he's Foreman's problem."

"Do you know what set him off?"

"I don't know what specifically got him started, but I gather he saw Hunnicutt coming after him."

"Great. So now we have a PTSD on our hands."

"It may just be temporary, from the ketamine."

"Right. Like the depression from the leg."

"You think we've done more harm than good here?"

Chase sighed. "With House, it might be hard to tell."

-0-

The rest of the night and early morning repeated the pattern. House would stay quiet until the sedative wore off, then spring into action, shouting and heaving himself around in bed until the next dose was administered.

"We were worried about the hydrocodone dependency," Foreman noted grimly. "Then we worried about the morphine dependency. Then we worried about ketamine dependency. Now we're setting him up for a benzodiazepine dependency."

"He'll never get bored," said Wilson, rubbing his eyes.

"You go on home," said Foreman. "I can handle him okay by myself."

"You sure?"

Foreman smiled. "I'm his worst nightmare—a black man with a syringe that can shut him down in mid-insult."

The next hours were peaceful enough. Foreman turned down the lights and dozed lightly. Then, at about two o'clock, he heard a familiar, if hoarse, voice.

"Smile, Foreman, so I can see you."

Foreman snorted and raised his eyes. House was regarding him from his pillow. He sounded like his old self, but there was a glitter in his eyes than set off a minor alarm in Foreman's head.

"How're you feeling?" he asked cautiously.

House grimaced and rubbed his forehead. "I knew there might be some wild-ass dream action with Special K, but this is ridiculous," he rasped. "I wonder if it's fried my brain permanently. Speaking of which: where are your flashcards tonight?"

"In my bag."

House regarded him shrewdly. "I didn't know you were still doing them. So you're still worried about the biopsy. You've gotten better at hiding it, anyway; I thought you were over it."

"It's not a small thing to mess with the brain," Foreman said noncommittally.

"You're telling me. Everything that makes us who we are has its origins in the mind/brain; toy with that, and you risk remaking a life. Talk about playing god. Stick an instrument into the white matter and suddenly a brilliant neurologist has trouble putting his own pants on."

"Actually, I'm good with pants now."

"Prolonged use of a psychoactive that reroutes neurons can have the same effect," House continued, as if Foreman hadn't spoken. "Too late to worry about it now; I've had five days' worth of K and the damage, if any, is done. If worse comes to worst, you and I can retire to a long-term care facility and spend the rest of our lives wiping the drool off each other's chins."

"If it comes to that, I dibs the lower bunk."

House didn't answer—he was staring at the doorway. "You brought him back!" he suddenly barked. "Jeeziz, Foreman, why'd you let him in here?" To whatever it was he saw in the doorway, House shouted hoarsely, "I told you, I'm sorry about your damned wife. I didn't kill her. Get out of here, you sick bastard. Get out!"

He started to rise from the bed. Foreman blocked him and rode him back to the mattress, fumbled a syringe out of his pocket and administered more Ativan. House fought more feebly, then seemed to give up. His eyes sought Foreman.

"You couldn't stop him," he remarked, "but I appreciate your trying..."

-0-

Exhausted as he was, Foreman offered to stay with Cuddy when she arrived at four for her shift. She declined, even after hearing why.

"I don't think you should be alone with him," Foreman said stubbornly.

"He's still missing his sartorius muscle," Cuddy pointed out. "If it comes to a footrace I can dust him, even in heels."

As if on cue, House's eyes flew open and fastened on his boss with a look of outrage.

"Oh, boy," muttered Foreman, sidling toward the bedside table and quietly opening the drawer.

"Wait," said Cuddy, impatiently. She leaned forward and said, loudly, "House! You're okay. It's just residual hallucinations from the ketamine. The coma is over."

House looked past her shoulder, his expression still grim and frightened.

"Hunnicut is not here," Cuddy said firmly. "The police have him. Foreman saw him in their custody. Right, Foreman?"

The neurologist nodded hesitantly. House threw him a skeptical look, then turned his attention back to Cuddy.

"How about taking this fucking tube out of my dick, then?" he demanded.

Foreman moved as if to comply, but Cuddy was ahead of him.

"Fine," she said coolly, and went to the cabinets for the necessary equipment. She snapped on gloves and went to work.

"While you're at it, take off those damned stockings," House whispered. "I feel like a drag queen."

Cuddy complied. "Will there be anything else?" she asked ironically.

A familiar grin played around House's lips. "Well...as long as you're down there..."

She snapped a finger, hard, on his thigh. "Behave yourself," she ordered, but as she turned away with the catheter in hand, there was a relieved smile on her face.

Foreman, seeing no need to hang around, staggered off to find coffee and/or a vacant cot.

"So how do you feel?" Cuddy asked, settling in a chair by the side of the bed.

"Dazed. Confused." House hesitated, then asked carefully, "You didn't...send me to Germany at one point, did you?"

Cuddy tried not to laugh and failed. "No. You were right here all the time. Why, did you smell sauerkraut?"

"I thought someone was speaking German to me," House said seriously. "She said Keira Knightly was going to give me a sponge bath." Cuddy raised her eyebrows.

"That's creative. This ketamine sounds like a fun trip. Maybe I'll do a coma next, and you can take care of me. I could use a vacation."

House regarded her somberly. "I don't recommend it," he said. "Check out the cruise lines instead."

Cuddy took a deep breath. "Well, it was only five days, and now they're over. The point is, was it worth it? Did it work?"

House stared at the ceiling. "I'm afraid..." he began, and Cuddy's heart sank. "I'm afraid to think it did," he finished, hesitantly. "I don't feel any pain, in my leg or anywhere else. But that could be the morphine."

Her heart back on sinus rhythm, Cuddy said, "You're not getting any morphine."

Startled, House looked at his IV unit. He looked at Cuddy, who broke into a wide smile. House grinned back.

"Goddamn," he whispered. "It worked. It actually worked. Thank you, Dr. Cuddy—you're back on my Christmas card list."

-0-

Chase sauntered in around seven, expecting cries of gratitude from the patient. Instead, House had prepared a merciless critique of the intensivist's handling of a case Cameron had "told" him about during the coma, when she finally got up the nerve to talk to him.

"There was no need to do an MRI; a blood test would have told you what you wanted to know a lot faster, without scaring the poor kid and his parents. Doing a biopsy was overkill; not doing a second urinalysis in 12 hours was criminally negligent. You were covering your ass with one hand and flashing it with the other. Bad diagnostics. Bad doctoring."

Disheartened, Chase turned to leave.

"But the coma thing," House added. "You did good with that. You did the coma thing perfectly."

"Thanks," said Chase, in a muffled voice.

"No," said House, only half-joking, "thank you."

-0-

By the time his parents appeared, House was almost completely lucid and in much better spirits; enough to spend half an hour talking to them before asking when they planned to leave. He still had trouble looking his father in the eye. But he smiled at most of John's jokes.

-0-

Cameron arrived just after the Houses left for lunch, her laptop under her arm. She had heard about the night before and peered at him apprehensively before sitting down. But House looked much the way he always did: smug, self-satisfied, ready for mischief.

"Dr. Cameron!" he hailed her. "How go the negotiations with your landlord? Is he going to spring for coral, or will you be forced to endure another year of oyster shell white?"

Cameron froze in horror—if House had heard that while in a coma, what else had he heard?

"So...you could hear while you were unconscious," she said carefully.

"On and off," House said evasively. "It's amazing what people will say in front of a guy with two good ears, just because his eyes are closed. Mr. Wentworth will probably write a book if he ever comes to. Which he won't. The point is, you hear stuff that explains things—like, for instance, why you've spent nearly 20 hours alone with me, helpless and unaware, and never peeked under the sheet."

"If you've seen one man in a hospital gown, you've seen them all," Cameron snarked lamely.

"You've never seen anything like this," House grinned, and whipped off the sheet.

Cameron gasped and averted her eyes—then looked cautiously back to see that House was wearing boxers.

"Look at it," House challenged her, lifting the hem of the right leg. "You know you want to. Look and tell me what you think."

And Cameron looked, absorbing the sight of the arroyo of ruined flesh on his leg. Gaining confidence, she coolly ran her fingers over the ridges.

"The surgeon did a really neat job," she said. "Does it hurt?"

"I don't feel a thing," House bragged. "Before you know it, I'll be up and around and no longer the pathetic case you've known and loved." He turned bright, calculating eyes in her direction.

"You'll always be a pathetic case to me," Cameron said flippantly. Hearing her own words she halted, horrified (he's ill! he's been shot! and you're picking on him!), and began to stammer an apology. House held up a peremptory finger.

"Ah ah ah," he chided. "If you're going to play with boys, you have to have the courage of your crudeness."

Then he changed the subject to the pile of slightly worse-for-wear gifts.

"What's up with all that? Are those for me or the guy who shot me?"

"It's all for you," Cameron smiled. "You might have to get used to the fact that people like and respect you."

"I don't care one way or another, as long as they're frisked at the door from now on," House groused. Then he asked, too casually, to have the list read to him.

"What list?"

"The list you've been making since they first started arriving, Miss Manners."

Cameron opened her laptop and found the file where she had indeed been listing the gifts and their givers, and began to read it aloud to him. House listened, tense and abstracted.

Wilson entered just as Cameron was getting to the end of the list.

"John Henry sent a Thelonius Monk anthology," she reported. "He suggested that you find a new career where if you get a dissatisfied customer, you're in a position to shoot back."

House smiled, but it was half-hearted.

"That's the list," Cameron summarized, closing her notebook. "I've written up thank-you notes that you can sign as soon as you feel up to it." House nodded. She looked at him, concerned.

"Are you okay? Do you need anything?" He shook his head and looked at Wilson. Cameron followed his gaze, puzzled. Wilson shifted his feet a little and looked away. She got the picture and rose.

"If you don't mind sitting with him a minute, I'll run down to the cafeteria and get something to eat." Wilson nodded, and Cameron left.

"Great exit line," House whispered. "Not very credible, though. She's already had half a yogurt today, and that should keep her going until midnight."

Wilson snorted. Then he stepped forward and handed House a small box.

House glanced at his friend apprehensively and opened it. Inside was a small medallion on a chain. The medallion was etched with a Greek character.

"Pi," House explained. "The ultimate puzzle."

He closed his hand around the medallion and relaxed for the first time since he asked Cameron to read her list. After a moment, he spoke.

"No note?"

Wilson opened his mouth to answer; hesitated.

"Come on, I can't imagine her being at a loss for words."

"She wrote to me. She said she didn't want to make things worse for you, but she couldn't do nothing, either. She told me to use my best judgment as to whether and when to give this to you."

House settled back against his pillows and closed his eyes.

"Good old-fashioned Southern manners," he whispered. "Someone can make you miserable, almost break up your marriage, and send you packing, but if he gets shot you send a present because it's the polite thing to do."

His tone bespoke a world-weary cynicism; but Wilson noticed that he was smiling faintly, and that the medallion was still cradled protectively in his hand.

THE END


End file.
